Publication details
Cross-cultural variation in the use of some text-organizing devices in research articles
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The presentation investigates research articles taken from two linguistic journals with the aim of discovering whether there is cross-cultural variation in the use of certain text-organizing devices, mostly labelled DMs in the literature. The comparative analysis is based on two corpora, one representing Anglo-American academic texts written by native speakers of English and the other representing Central European academic texts produced by non-native expert writers. Conceived as explicit signals of semantic relations between segments of discourse and thus contributing to both cohesion and coherence, DMs are expected to be relatively frequent in academic written discourse, in which convincing argumentation and presentation of the author’s standpoints is of great importance. The aim is to discover which semantic relations (e.g. apposition, result, contrast, concession) tend to be expressed overtly by DMs, since they are mostly used intentionally by writers as guiding signals to help the prospective readers arrive at an interpretation coherent with the author’s communicative intentions and to enable negotiation of meaning between the discourse participants. |