Genre research

EVA, a text processing tool designed to be self-contained and useful for a variety of languages, is described briefly, and its extensive coded character set is illustrated. Features, specifications, and database functions are noted. Its application in development of a Slovenian literary dictionary is also described. (MSE)

One can ask four questions about genre validity across cultures. Does a certain form or configuration occur in the culture in question? Is it acceptable? If acceptable, is it in practice preferred? Is it recommended by prescriptive authorities? This paper reports the results of an attempt to answer these questions empirically by testing the responses to four different customer-complaint dialogues in English of 100 students in each of six countries: Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, England, Italy, and Japan. The result is that most versions are seen by respondents as occurring in most cultures, that a 'clear, brief, sincere' version seems most acceptable worldwide, that this version is also preferred in the four north-western European countries, but not necessarily in Italy or Japan, and that of the various prescribed versions some are never preferred and others are only preferred in one or two countries.

Emic and Etic Definitions, which penetrates into the issues and functioning of categories identified or constructed as genres. The final section, Between Folklore and Literature, turns to the dynamics of interfaces between oral and written culture where genres can be most challenging to approach and analyze, as the culmination of an issue that intersects with at least one paper in every preceding section. Although the sections present a progression of thematic centers, each of those themes is also found recurrently in every section, situating both individual contributions and whole sections in dialogue with one another, and it is through that dialogue of many voices that Genre-Text-Interpretation forms a volume as a whole.

This study explored sales promotion letters (SPLs) and company profiles (CPs) of two prominent batik companies in Solo, Central Java, Indonesia. This essay draws its data from the most important primary source of information on sales promotion letters and company profiles namely words, phrases, and clauses taken from the SPLs and CPs of batik written in Indonesian. Secondary sources were also consulted in this research, among these transcribed data obtained from in-depth interviews with the text writers and buyers. Three SPLs and two batik CPs were analyzed. In addition, two informants (marketing and promotion managers) typifying the text production perspective and two buyers typifying the text consumption perspective were interviewed. This research was guided by theories of genre analysis which focuses on patterns of rhetorical organization and genre-specific language features. This study employed the multi-dimensional and multi perspective model of analysis focusing on textual, so...

This paper examines book blurbs of Cameroonian authors, written in English. The main focus is to determine the lexical devices used by the writers in order to realize the communicative purpose of the genre, as well as their private intentions. Data for the study is collected from 40 Cameroonian book blurbs, randomly selected from four disciplines: language, fiction, social sciences and hard sciences. The analysis of the data is based on the genre theory and focuses on the lexical categories used by Cameroonian writers in their blurbs. The findings reveal that Cameroonian blurb writers use verbs, nouns, positive evaluative adjectives and adverbs, to realize various communicative intentions in the different moves of the blurbs, which all combine to realize the academic and promotional communicative purposes of the genre, hence advertising the book described or its author in the eyes of the target population.

Conjunctive adverbials or simply conjuncts represent specific sentence elements contributing to the overall semantic coherence of a text. Their use or omission depends entirely on the decision of the author of the text, the way he or she perceives and intends to convey a particular type of connection between its individual parts. In the present linguistic study of the literary work—the self-selected novel “Jane Eyre”—we observe and subsequently specify and evaluate occurrence of conjunctive adverbials in the text with the focus on their particular semantic categories and positions within a sentence.

This paper examines the evolution of criticisms (CRs) and their targets in a corpus of 100 French-written book reviews (BRs), 50 published between 1890 and 1900 (Block A) and 50 between 1990 and 2000 (Block B). Critical and uncritical BRs were identified. The number of CRs, their level of specificity and hedginess and their targets were recorded in each critical BR. The targets identified were classified as either contextual, conceptual or textual. Within-and between-Block comparisons were performed using chi-square tests. Results show that critical BRs are more frequent in Block A than in Block B, although the difference is not statistically significant. They also show that hedged CRs outnumber unhedged ones in the whole corpus (p = .0001) and in each Block (p = .0001) and that unhedged CRs are more frequent in Block A than in Block B (p = .0034). Conceptual and contextual targets are the most frequent ones in the whole corpus. Contextual CRs in Block A outnumber those in Block B (p = .0001), whereas both conceptual and textual CRs are more frequent in Block B than in Block A (p = .0008 and p = .03). Our findings underline the increasing social function and cognitive complexity of today's scientific enterprise.

Conjunctive adverbials or simply conjuncts represent specific sentence elements contributing to the overall semantic coherence of a text. Their use or omission depends entirely on the decision of the author of the text, the way he or she perceives and intends to convey a particular type of connection between its individual parts. In the present linguistic study of the literary work—the self-selected novel “Jane Eyre”—we observe and subsequently specify and evaluate occurrence of conjunctive adverbials in the text with the focus on their particular semantic categories and positions within a sentence.

As a discourse genre, statements of purpose are characterized by their occluded status in the academy and by their hybrid nature. Statements of purpose are required in applications for a place in a postgraduate course (Master’s degree or doctorate), and they are requested to obtain information about the academic and professional background and skills of each applicant. A study of the genre’s linguistic and textual features is needed in Spanish to discover and understand writers’ and readers’ perception of this genre. A corpus of 50 motivation letters in Spanish is analyzed here. We study the distinguishing macro- and microtextual features of this particular genre and co-occurrences between both kinds of features. At the macrotextual level, statements of purpose display prototypical rhetorical moves, which can be classified as writers’ moves and readers’ moves. On the microtextual level, modalization resources and discourse markers are discussed. This multiple perspectives analysis o...

As a first document used to assess someone’s capacity, an application letter is required to be created in good genre moves to show someone’s positive identity. This study analyzed the genre moves of students’ application letters and investigated the students’ identity portrayed in their texts. Using the SFL approach, this study analyzed four texts written by eleventh-grade students of a private school in West Java regions of Indonesia. The findings showed that the students’ texts still weakly showed their positive identity since they did not cover all genre moves in their application letters. The students from the middle and high class used five of seven genre moves, while lowlevel students only used three of them. Although readers could still indicate that the documents belonged to application letters, the letters could not meet the purpose of an application letter since the text could not show the author’s identity.

This study explored sales promotion letters (SPLs) and company profiles (CPs) of two prominent batik companies in Solo, Central Java, Indonesia. This essay draws its data from the most important primary source of information on sales promotion letters and company profiles namely words, phrases, and clauses taken from the SPLs and CPs of batik written in Indonesian. Secondary sources were also consulted in this research, among these transcribed data obtained from in-depth interviews with the text writers and buyers. Three SPLs and two batik CPs were analyzed. In addition, two informants (marketing and promotion managers) typifying the text production perspective and two buyers typifying the text consumption perspective were interviewed. This research was guided by theories of genre analysis which focuses on patterns of rhetorical organization and genre-specific language features. This study employed the multi-dimensional and multi perspective model of analysis focusing on textual, so...

As a first document used to assess someone’s capacity, an application letter is required to be created in good genre moves to show someone’s positive identity. This study analyzed the genre moves of students’ application letters and investigated the students’ identity portrayed in their texts. Using the SFL approach, this study analyzed four texts written by eleventh-grade students of a private school in West Java regions of Indonesia. The findings showed that the students’ texts still weakly showed their positive identity since they did not cover all genre moves in their application letters. The students from the middle and high class used five of seven genre moves, while lowlevel students only used three of them. Although readers could still indicate that the documents belonged to application letters, the letters could not meet the purpose of an application letter since the text could not show the author’s identity.

The continuous study of stylistics has been regarded as significant in identifying the border between language and literature. Hence the study presented a stylistic analysis of Alfredo Q. Gonzales’s essay “The Will of the River.” The lexis-grammar complementary analysis on the personal narrative of the author focused on the vocabulary of the essay and the grammatical structure of the sentence primarily the use of sentence-initial adjuncts that leads to the unraveling of the essay’s general theme of man and

In this article, we explore how corpus-based techniques can broaden our understanding of how lexical and grammatical features help to shape and define the persuasive features of philanthropic direct mail letters by allowing us to examine the patterns of dozens of linguistic features across a large number of texts. Using 316 direct mail letters from 108 organizations across five philanthropic fields, we use a multidimensional analysis technique, developed by Biber (1988), to develop a linguistic profile of the genre. This profile is based on five linguistic "dimensions" that are determined by which of 67 linguistics features typically co-occur. Based on the assumption that linguistic features do not randomly co-occur in texts but in fact together serve a functional purpose, these dimensions can be used to show how genres vary, as reflected by their use of different linguistic features, in order to accomplish generic goals. Our findings show that philanthropic direct mail letters are indeed a unique genre, displaying a pattern of linguistic features that are quite distinct from other common genres.

The study of titles in technical discourse and, specifically, in civil engineering research articles (CERA) is a pending issue within Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP). Research into this area can benefit researchers and students of engineering. This paper aims to fill this gap by focusing on the most common phraseological and rhetorical features of these titles. A corpus of sixty titles of CERA was compiled from six recently published journals indexed in the Web of Science (ISI). The corpus was examined both structurally (i.e. word count, word function, and syntactic encoding of components) and phraseologically (i.e. word combination, word position, and meaning analysis). The main research questions that this work aims to address are twofold: (i) Are the structure and content of CERA titles characterized by certain conventions (such as the degree of technical explicitness)? (ii) Do these titles contain specific and recurrent phraseological patterns, and if so, what are they? The findings of this study suggest the existence of specific traits in CERA titles, such as the correlation between title length, title type, and degree of technical explicitness. The results outline the features that shape this particular engineering subgenre and could serve to inform future LSP teaching and learning material.

The aim of this study is to investigate the use of discourse connectors (DCs) in argumentative compositions of Thai undergraduates and English-native speakers. Out of 44 compositions, 24 were collected from third-year English major students in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Thaksin University, Songkhla Campus whereas 20 compositions of English-native students at University of Michigan were retrieved from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). Following the taxonomy adopted from Halliday and Hasan (1976), Biber et al. (1999), and Cowan (2008), a list of 140 DCs were classified into 8 semantic categories. Findings revealed that both groups of students shared similar characteristics with regard to the types of DCs used in their essays, but with different degree of occurrence. Among a wide range of DCs, and, but, because, for example and also were mostly found in the compositions of the two groups. In terms of syntactic distribution, the Thai learners h...

Resumo: Neste artigo, discute-se a utilizacao do recurso hipermidiatico video em periodicos cientificos. Para isso, realizou-se uma analise do Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE). A fundamentacao conceitual se divide em duas partes: na primeira, expoem-se as possibilidades de utilizacao dos recursos hipermidiaticos nos periodicos cientificos; e, na segunda, evidenciam-se os beneficios da utilizacao de video e as experiencias de alguns periodicos e editoras. A secao resultados e discussoes divide-se em tres subsecoes. Na primeira, descrevem-se as caracteristicas editoriais do periodico, identificando: as formas de assinatura e de acesso, o processo de publicacao, as bases em que esta indexado, o fator de impacto e a composicao do corpo editorial. Na segunda, abordam-se o numero de artigos publicados por ano e a distribuicao por area tematica. Na terceira, identificam-se os padroes e as tecnologias utilizados. Considera-se que a utilizacao de video em periodicos cientificos pode ...

Conforme apontado por Fairclough (2003, p. 77), "o desenvolvimento de tecnologias de comunicação acompanha o desenvolvimento de novos gêneros." Um periódico fundado em 2006, JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), trouxe novas possibilidades à publicação científica: o áudio e o vídeo. Dado o caráter recente de artigos em tal formato de publicação, ainda são inexistentes pesquisas que explorem características deste tipo de publicação. O objetivo do presente artigo é analisar artigos audiovisuais de pesquisa, publicados no periódico JoVE, com foco na metafunção interpessoal, de forma a investigar se este gênero emergente compartilha recursos interpessoais com artigos tradicionalmente escritos (SALAGER-MEYER, 1994; HYLAND, 1996; VARTALLA, 1998). Como procedimento metodológico, 12 artigos foram transcritos e analisados em termos de Modo Oracional, função de fala, e grau e função de Modalidade. Foi possível perceber que artigos audiovisuais de pesquisa possuem uma natureza predominantemente instrucional, o que os diferencia dos artigos tradicionalmente escritos.

One noteworthy aspect is that the more famous the authors are, the less they tend to conform to generic norms and standard scientific reporting style. The present paper will show, with qualitative data from the Introductions of influential volumes by Christie (1970), Critchley (1970), Dalgleish & Power (1999), Kolb & Wishshaw (2003) Gazzaniga (2004), Goldstein & McNeil (2004), how authors feel free to use a more personal language, constructing a delicate balance between consideration for the canons of scientific reporting and the need for more authentic, holistic interaction with the audience. Far from disguising their personal involvement, they highlight how their research fits into a larger picture, engaging the readers as participants in a disciplinary discourse that functions as situated social interaction. Evidence will be given of the discoursal features these famous authors use to ‘trade’ knowledge from their personal perspectives – explicitly appraising both individual and c...

This paper applies Halliday’s systemic functional grammar to examine the ways conjunctive adjuncts are used in the written English of Malaysian undergraduates. Student essays selected from the Malaysian Corpus of Learner English were examined with a focus on cohesion in the light of a preliminary study of the texts which pointed to the insufficient or inappropriate use of cohesive devices. The aim is to find out what conjunctive adjuncts are used and how they are used in linking successive sentences in their texts. The students had difficulty in using conjunctive adjuncts effectively in paragraphs, and left sentences juxtaposed in inappropriate ways. Only a small part of the range of cohesive devices available in English was used at all, and much of what was used was incorrect or otherwise unsuitable.

Almost ten years ago we wrote that academicians had been debating about the exact place of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP)-and similarly, Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) and Languages for Academic Purposes (LAP)-, and whether or not ESP was valued on a par in higher education vis-à-vis EAP and vice versa. Some linguists tended to reject this parity on the grounds that one devalues the other. Our proposal, at that time, was that we "concentrate on what can be developed in common to contribute positively to the debate" (Piqué et al., 1996: 6). LSP is sufficiently diversified, as Kachru (1988: 9) wrote, to cover three basic assumptions: […] appropriateness of language corpus; format organization of the corpus at various linguistic levels; phonetic, phonological, lexical, syntactic, and discoursal; and the relationship between the formal features and the functions of the texts in terms of the profession, participants, and so on. And Alcaraz (2003: 5), in his prologue to Rosario Bueno's bibliographical study, wrote: En lo que a las lenguas modernas se refiere, la interdisciplinariedad ha significado su fecunda unión con otras ramas del saber, como el derecho, la medicina, los negocios, la ciencia y la tecnología, la industria, etc., y el resultado de esta fructífera alianza son las lenguas de especialidad, también llamadas lenguajes profesionales y académicos.

Artikkeli tarkastelee historiallisesta poetiikasta käytyä keskustelua 1800-luvulta nykypäiviin sekä hahmottelee sitä tutkimussuuntauksena, joka keskittyy kirjallisten ilmiöiden historialliseen tarkasteluun, kuvaamiseen ja teoretisointiin. Poetiikka on ymmärretty 1500-luvulta lähtien ei-historiallisesti, mutta venäläinen Aleksander Veselovski loi 1800-luvun lopussa historiallisen poetiikan käsitteen, joka vaikutti laajasti myöhempään tutkimukseen suoraan ja epäsuorasti. 1900-luvun alkupuolta ja puoliväliä hallitsivat synkroniset poetiikan teoriat, mutta historialliset poetiikan ohjelmat alkoivat nousta esiin ja yleistyä 1970-luvulta lähtien, ja ne ovat ajankohtaistuneet 2010-luvulla uusien historiallisen poetiikan tutkimusverkostojen synnyn myötä. Artikkeli kartoittaa ja arvioi kriittisesti historiallisen poetiikan ohjelmia Veselovskista Tel Avivin koulukuntaan, uushistorismin kulttuuriseen poetiikkaan ja nykytutkimuksessa tapahtuvaan historiallisen poetiikan uudelleenarviointiin. Ar...

This review article seeks to offer an analytic and critical overview of research on scientific writing from a largely linguistic perspective. This perspective, we believe, complements the interests of those working in Information Science, with its central concern with the literatures involved in scholarly communication through bibliometrics, citation analysis and information retrieval. Such studies have long drawn upon insights from linguistic theory and analysis as a means of understanding knowledge, and our discussion is an attempt to systematize the sources of these insights. We leave it to readers of this journal how they might appropriate and employ the approaches and research we report. In the paper we take a broad view of scientific to include the natural, social and human sciences, and understanding writing principally as research writing but also including instructional and student writing, we first briefly discuss the significance of writing to the academy and then go on to look at research into its key features from generic, disciplinary and cross-linguistic perspectives.

The quality of any academic essay highly depends on cohesion and coherence since they affect the overall quality and the tone of the writing to a great extent. Conjunctive adverbials are among the types of devices which logically help linking sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into essays. Conjunctive Adverbials ultimately affect the cohesion and coherence of any piece of writing. This paper investigates conjunctive adverbials in essays written by Iraqi Kurd EFL learners at the undergraduate level. It explicitly attempts to discover what specific conjunctive adverbials types are overused, underused, or misused and in what positions in sentences. A learner corpus of 50 complete essays was compiled for this study. The findings showed that the participants tended to use more sequential and additive conjunctive adverbials than adversative and causals. Additionally, the results demonstrated that the learners relied heavily on a limited number of conjunctive adverbials, mainly in th...

the oldest university in Scandinavia founded in 1477. For several decades, she has been Director of the Unit for Advanced Studies in Modern Swedish (FUMS). Professor Gunnarsson has managed several large research projects, such as "LSP texts in the 20th century" and "Texts in European Writing Communities". She has published extensively in the area of professional communication, LSP, academic discourse, text linguistics, historical text studies and multilingualism. As a compilation of her work, the book Professional Discourse (reviewed in this volume) was published in 2009. Britt-Louise Gunnarson (BLG): It all started when I was conducting a study on gender issues in PhD students' seminars. We were a multidisciplinary group doing the study on authentic interaction in seminars within the faculty of humanities, social sciences and science. We found out that in the science seminars, the PhD students were speaking English, although they were Swedish. This was in the mid 90's, and I was quite surprised. It was also before the Swedish authorities started the investigation about language use that eventually led to the new Swedish language law. 1 So this was the origin of a great survey at Uppsala University on the use of English, Swedish and other languages. It was an ordinary questionnaire survey, but it was big, covering all of the university, all disciplines, and it was the first time this was investigated.

the oldest university in Scandinavia founded in 1477. For several decades, she has been Director of the Unit for Advanced Studies in Modern Swedish (FUMS). Professor Gunnarsson has managed several large research projects, such as "LSP texts in the 20th century" and "Texts in European Writing Communities". She has published extensively in the area of professional communication, LSP, academic discourse, text linguistics, historical text studies and multilingualism. As a compilation of her work, the book Professional Discourse (reviewed in this volume) was published in 2009. Britt-Louise Gunnarson (BLG): It all started when I was conducting a study on gender issues in PhD students' seminars. We were a multidisciplinary group doing the study on authentic interaction in seminars within the faculty of humanities, social sciences and science. We found out that in the science seminars, the PhD students were speaking English, although they were Swedish. This was in the mid 90's, and I was quite surprised. It was also before the Swedish authorities started the investigation about language use that eventually led to the new Swedish language law. 1 So this was the origin of a great survey at Uppsala University on the use of English, Swedish and other languages. It was an ordinary questionnaire survey, but it was big, covering all of the university, all disciplines, and it was the first time this was investigated.

As a first document used to assess someone’s capacity, an application letter is required to be created in good genre moves to show someone’s positive identity. This study analyzed the genre moves of students’ application letters and investigated the students’ identity portrayed in their texts. Using the SFL approach, this study analyzed four texts written by eleventh-grade students of a private school in West Java regions of Indonesia. The findings showed that the students’ texts still weakly showed their positive identity since they did not cover all genre moves in their application letters. The students from the middle and high class used five of seven genre moves, while lowlevel students only used three of them. Although readers could still indicate that the documents belonged to application letters, the letters could not meet the purpose of an application letter since the text could not show the author’s identity.

This study aims to investigate the rhetorical genre components and the pragmatic evaluation options used to articulate the communicative function of ArBR genre, and find out how these generic and evaluation options contrast with those reported in other languages and cultures. To this end, a corpus of 50 book reviews written by 50 Arab reviewers was collected and analyzed within the rhetorical components developed and applied by Motta-Roth (1998) to English book reviews. The present study drew on Hyland (2000), Gea Valor (2000–2001), Moreno and Suárez (2008a) and Alcaraz-Ariza (2010) in order to examine how the qualities of ArBRs are evaluated and in which terms (i.e., criticism or praise). The results indicated that the Arab reviewers employed additional sub-moves that have not been used by other researchers. Unlike English book reviewers, Arab reviewers try to avoid criticism. Instead, they usually devote most of their book reviews to describe and summarize uncritically although cr...

While the knowledge contained in US patents descriptions is essentially the same as that conveyed by textbooks and journal articles (Myers 1995, Owen-Smith 2003), it must be shaped to claim temporary exclusive property over an invention. To effectively safeguard the value of such property, patents must reveal enough to suggest technical feasibility but conceal detail to cloud the specifications making replication easy. Usually co-authored by inventors and lawyers, the genre is therefore expected to hold a subtle interplay between boosting and hedging and gather traits from interdisciplinary discourses (Hyland 2000), in this case technical and legal. The aim of this study in progress is twofold: 1) to identify the linguistic act patterns used to match the requirements of legal patentability and the commercial interests of inventors, and 2) to bridge a gap in the know-how of readers and technical students by determining the discursive moves and interdisciplinary traits of the genre, c...

While the knowledge contained in US patents descriptions is essentially the same as that conveyed by textbooks and journal articles (Myers 1995, Owen-Smith 2003), it must be shaped to claim temporary exclusive property over an invention. To effectively safeguard the value of such property, patents must reveal enough to suggest technical feasibility but conceal detail to cloud the specifications making replication easy. Usually co-authored by inventors and lawyers, the genre is therefore expected to hold a subtle interplay between boosting and hedging and gather traits from interdisciplinary discourses (Hyland 2000), in this case technical and legal. The aim of this study in progress is twofold: 1) to identify the linguistic act patterns used to match the requirements of legal patentability and the commercial interests of inventors, and 2) to bridge a gap in the know-how of readers and technical students by determining the discursive moves and interdisciplinary traits of the genre, c...

The need for rich and meaningful vocabulary knowledge in developing concepts in content areas is documented by research and is generally accepted by classroom teachers (Monroe & Panchyshyn, 1995-1996). Mathematics is recognized as the most difficult content area reading material, "with more concepts per word, per sentence, and per paragraph than any other area" (Schell, 1982, p. 544). Because vocabulary represents and provides access to concepts, instruction in the vocabulary of mathematics cannot be incidental. It requires careful attention within the school curriculum (Gawned, 1990). Teachers need assistance in knowing how to provide meaningful vocabulary instruction in mathematics. In an ongoing effort to find effective ways to teach the vocabulary of mathematics, the author conducted a review of the literature on graphic organizers. Although only limited research was found on the use of graphic organizers in mathematics instruction (Monroe & Pendergrass, 1997), there w...

What makes non-profit, philanthropic discourse so persuasive has not been well explored to date. Using a specialized corpus of direct-mail letters from philanthropic organizations in five different fields, this study seeks to combine the tools of corpus analysis with the specificity of genre analysis in a way that has not been done before to provide a new perspective on a genre that is not well understood. The underlying goal is to look for a methodology that will provide much of the qualitative detail that is common to genre analysis, while at the same time providing the reliability that is best assured by the quantitative power of computerized corpus analysis. Using Bhatia's approach to genre analysis (1993) and his exploratory efforts in investigating fundraising discourse (1997, 1998) as a foundation, key patterns in the rhetorical structure of direct-mail letters revealed through a large-scale corpus analysis are presented.

Almost ten years ago we wrote that academicians had been debating about the exact place of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP)-and similarly, Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) and Languages for Academic Purposes (LAP)-, and whether or not ESP was valued on a par in higher education vis-à-vis EAP and vice versa. Some linguists tended to reject this parity on the grounds that one devalues the other. Our proposal, at that time, was that we "concentrate on what can be developed in common to contribute positively to the debate" (Piqué et al., 1996: 6). LSP is sufficiently diversified, as Kachru (1988: 9) wrote, to cover three basic assumptions: […] appropriateness of language corpus; format organization of the corpus at various linguistic levels; phonetic, phonological, lexical, syntactic, and discoursal; and the relationship between the formal features and the functions of the texts in terms of the profession, participants, and so on. And Alcaraz (2003: 5), in his prologue to Rosario Bueno's bibliographical study, wrote: En lo que a las lenguas modernas se refiere, la interdisciplinariedad ha significado su fecunda unión con otras ramas del saber, como el derecho, la medicina, los negocios, la ciencia y la tecnología, la industria, etc., y el resultado de esta fructífera alianza son las lenguas de especialidad, también llamadas lenguajes profesionales y académicos.

The continuous study of stylistics has been regarded as significant in identifying the border between language and literature. Hence the study presented a stylistic analysis of Alfredo Q. Gonzales’s essay “The Will of the River.” The lexis-grammar complementary analysis on the personal narrative of the author focused on the vocabulary of the essay and the grammatical structure of the sentence primarily the use of sentence-initial adjuncts that leads to the unraveling of the essay’s general theme of man and

Although academic book reviews have been extensively discussed in a number of languages and in terms of a variety of factors, there is at least one point that has not yet been taken into consideration, namely the authorship factor (i.e. the number of the academic book authors) and its possible influence on evaluative language of the review. This assumption has given rise to the present study, which centres on a corpus-based analysis of one hundred linguistic book reviews with a half written by a single author and the other fifty being a collection of more than two authors. The investigation rests on Giannoni's (2010) typology of academic values, from which three values, i.e. goodness, novelty and relevance and their lexical evaluative markers have been subjected to manual and automatic analyses with the aim to comparing and contrasting variation in value distribution in two corpora. Furthermore, the overall research findings have been presented in the form of the chi-square test in order to determine whether there exists any statistical significance between the selected categorical variables, and comment on accordingly.

In this article we analysed a corpus of  letters of application that received an evaluation by the recruiters. We investigated whether there existed a correlation between the structural and linguistic characteristics of the letters and the positive or negative evaluation by the recruiting officers. For the rhetorical structure of the letters of application, we adopted the genre approach by Bhatia (1993); for the persuasiveness of the style we used the metadiscursivity classification of Louhiala-Salminen (1999). Both the move structure and the metadiscursivity seem to play an important role in the appreciation of the letters of application by the recruitment officers. There is a signifi cant correlation between the evaluation by the recruitment officers on the one hand and the rhetorical structure and the use of metadiscursive elements on the other hand.

This study examines the relative contributions of subculture membership and mothertongue status/target culture membership in writing transactional letters. We examined the letters accompanying articles initially submitted for publication by 26 NSE and 23 NNSE academics, and compared them with eorts to write such letters by 21 NSE and 23 NNSE non-professionals (British undergraduates and overseas English teachers). The results showed that the non-native professionals by and large perceived the rhetorical demands of the situation similarly to native professionals but were a little less likely to use appropriate language. The native non-professionals controlled some appropriate phrases, and were able to use appropriate vocabulary, but had very little idea of the rhetoric, while the non-native non-professionals produced grammatically competent letters that were inappropriate in both rhetoric and language. Thus the teaching approach for writing depends crucially on the status of the learners, and lexical phrases are particularly important for non-natives.

Bhatia / Gotti (2006)-e, più recentemente, sulle identità linguistico-culturali, professionali e autoriali. Appare adesso necessario costruire un equilibrio fra l'attenzione ai tratti di individualità, alle caratteristiche di genere, all'identità dei singoli testi, e ai valori collettivi delle comunità scientifiche. Il punto d'interesse di questo studio è il linguaggio dei manuali di neuroscienze cognitive, in prospettiva diacronica. L'ipotesi della proporzionalità diretta tra la presenza di tratti di individualità e il prestigio degli autori, soprattutto nelle introduzioni di tali testi, è stata supportata dai dati. Si è utilizzato un corpus di 8 manuali di rilievo nella storia delle neuroscienze cognitive (1970-2004), che è stato analizzato prevalentemente applicando le categorie dell'Appraisal Framework (Martin/White 2005). I dati hanno evidenziato elementi sia di cambiamento, sia di continuità. Insieme all'affermarsi di una terminologia/linguaggio meno 'speculativo' e sempre più espressione dell'innovazione tecnologico-scientifica, si rileva la persistenza del manifestarsi delle persone autoriali. Gli scienziati di successo continuano a ricercare, nel 1970 come nel 2004, in determinati loci testuali, una comunicazione olistica con i lettori, che renda possibile condividere informalmente "la genesi e l'evolversi di un'idea" (Christie 1970:1), e ricorrono a tratti discorsivi che evidenziano il valore del lavoro sia individuale, sia di gruppo, in una articolata interazione di aderenza ai canoni della comunicazione scientifica, e di affermazione di identità individuale.

This study applied a "moves analysis" approach to examine job application letters written by 25 Malaysian graduates obtained from an outsourcing organisation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The letters were analysed as to whether they adhered to the seven aspects of the "moves structure" used to analyse job applications (i.e. establishing credentials, introducing candidate, detailing advantages, enclosing relevant documents, ending appropriately, offering incentives, and using pressure tactics). Additionally, interviews were held with five human resource managers from five different organisations. From the interviews, the managers emphasised that it was important that job application letters should contain at least five of the seven moves from the framework. The findings obtained revealed that Malaysian graduates employed five out of the seven strategies from the moves structure and had covered the basic format of the job application letter. Most applicants omitted Move 5 (using pressure tactics), but the findings suggest that this variation did not hinder the communicative purpose of the letters.

As a discourse genre, statements of purpose are characterized by their occluded status in the academy and by their hybrid nature. Statements of purpose are required in applications for a place in a postgraduate course (master's degree or doctorate) and they are requested to obtain information about the academic and professional background and skills of each applicant. A study of the genre's linguistic and textual features is needed in Spanish to discover and understand writers' and readers' perception of this genre. A corpus of 50 motivation letters in Spanish is analyzed here. We study the distinguishing macro and microtextual features of this particular genre and cooccurrences between both kinds of features. At the macrotextual level, statements of purpose display prototypical rhetorical moves, which can be classified as writer's moves and reader's moves. On the microtextual level, modalization resources and discourse markers are discussed. This multiple pe...

(The paper is written in Finnish, only the abstract in English. If you need further information on the paper, please contact the author.)


Historical Poetics as an Approach in Literary Studies

The paper examines renowned programs and definitions of historical poetics from the nineteenth century to the 2000s. As a metatheoretical study, the paper compares the different programs and makes conceptual distinctions between different ways of understanding historical poetics. Three basic types are abstracted from the discussions: diachronic, diachronic-contextual, and contextual poetics. Diachronic poetics focuses on the temporal change of literary devices, conventions, and repertoires, whereas diachronic-contextual poetics also sets these changes in their historical contexts. The two are the main types of historical poetics, the first being suggested by Roman Jakobson and Benjamin Harshav (previously Hrusovski), and the latter by Alexander Veselovsky. The third type, contextual poetics, can be inferred from recent discussion on diachronic narratology. Contextual poetics differs from the first two in that it does not offer a diachronic account of the development of literary devices but gives a contextualized description of their state at some moment in history. In Finnish literary studies, the concept of historical poetics has not been discussed, even if numerous previous and recent studies can be included in its category. The suggested metatheoretical analysis helps us to better understand the field of study but also opens up new scenarios for future research, such as combining narratology with genre studies in terms of historical poetics.

Keywords: poetics, historical poetics, diachronic poetics, diachronic-contextual poetics, literary history, historical genre study, diachronic narratology

While the knowledge contained in US patents descriptions is essentially the same as that conveyed by textbooks and journal articles (Myers 1995, Owen-Smith 2003), it must be shaped to claim temporary exclusive property over an invention. To effectively safeguard the value of such property, patents must reveal enough to suggest technical feasibility but conceal detail to cloud the specifi cations making replication easy. Usually co-authored by inventors and lawyers, the genre is therefore expected to hold a subtle interplay between boosting and hedging and gather traits from interdisciplinary discourses (Hyland 2000), in this case technical and legal. The aim of this study in progress is twofold: 1) to identify the linguistic act patterns used to match the requirements of legal patentability and the commercial interests of inventors, and 2) to bridge a gap in the know-how of readers and technical students by determining the discursive moves and interdisciplinary traits of the genre, comparing them with more familiar instances like manuals or specialized publications. To achieve this purpose, a corpus of 343 US electro-mechanical patents has been analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively with concordancing software at a macro (rhetorical) and microlevel (linguistic realizations). At this fi rst stage of the research, the prime focus has been set on the most common boosting and hedging devices which stylistically feature the genre and may constitute a lexical and discursive technolectal repertoire useful for both professionals and engineering students. Among the devices detected, some (e.g. signaling nouns and verbs, repetition, evaluative adjectives and adverbs, inferential markers as code glosses) are signs of a pragmatic deference towards the non-expert members of the discursive community (i.e. lawyers and potential investors) and prove to be effi cient means to overcome knowledge asymmetries.

The quality of any academic essay highly depends on cohesion and coherence since they affect the overall quality and the tone of the writing to a great extent. Conjunctive adverbials are among the types of devices which logically help linking sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into essays. Conjunctive Adverbials ultimately affect the cohesion and coherence of any piece of writing. This paper investigates conjunctive adverbials in essays written by Iraqi Kurd EFL learners at the undergraduate level. It explicitly attempts to discover what specific conjunctive adverbials types are overused, underused, or misused and in what positions in sentences. A learner corpus of 50 complete essays was compiled for this study. The findings showed that the participants tended to use more sequential and additive conjunctive adverbials than adversative and causals. Additionally, the results demonstrated that the learners relied heavily on a limited number of conjunctive adverbials, mainly in th...

Dissertação de vestibular: um enfoque funcional sobre a organização do gênero Rosângela do Socorro Nogueira de Sousa 1* Resumo: Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar o resultado de pesquisa desenvolvida como dissertação de mestrado, enfocando a organização do gênero "dissertação escolar" sob o escopo da gramática sistêmico-funcional de Halliday (1985). O material de análise é composto por 44 textos de alunos de pré-vestibular divididos em dois grupos: O primeiro grupo é composto por 22 textos aos quais foi atribuída nota maior que 6,0 (seis) e o segundo grupo é composto também por 22 textos aos quais foi atribuída nota igual ou menor que 6,0 (seis). São colocadas em evidência as estruturas de mensagem (tema e rema) e seu modus operandis no texto como elementos que contribuem para os processos de significação a partir dos padrões de desenvolvimento temático. Os resultados apontam para o fato de que não há diferença entre os tipos de Temas escolhidos nos dois grupos, mas os elementos temáticos e o método de desenvolvimento diferem. No que diz respeito aos padrões de desenvolvimento, nos textos do primeiro grupo, a maior incidência foi do padrão zigzag e, nos do segundo grupo, do tema reiterado. Palavras-chave: redação; Funcionalismo; Tema; padrões de desenvolvimento temático.