Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings / John M. Swales
01 Jan 1991-Vol. 1991, Iss: 1991, pp 1-99
About: The article was published on 1991-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 5640 citations till now.
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TL;DR: The authors examined a total of 200 Arabic written wedding invitations in terms of their component patterns and the role played by the broader socio-cultural norms and values in shaping this genre, and found that religious affiliation and masculine kinship authority not only construct and shape text component selection but also color the lexical choices and naming practices.
Abstract: The present study examines through a genre and critical discourse analysis a total of 200 Arabic written wedding invitations in terms of their component patterns, and the role played by the broader socio-cultural norms and values in shaping this genre. It draws on two analytic frameworks from discourse: genre analysis, and critical discourse analysis (CDA). CDA has exposed at least two interrelated aspects of culture - religion and masculine authority - that have a fundamental effect on the organizational details of this communicative event, and a detailed genre analysis has identified eight generic components that are ritually drawn upon in the process of wedding invitation production. CDA results have shown how religious affiliation and masculine kinship authority not only construct and shape text component selection but also color the lexical choices and naming practices. I hope that the results of this study will be of help in further understanding the socio-cultural aspects that constrain the communi...
51 citations
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01 Jan 2013TL;DR: This chapter will argue that smaller, carefully collected, context-specific corpora, both spoken and written, are of great import in pragmatics research, and how this synergy of small corpora and pragmatic research provides rich and contextualised findings.
Abstract: Corpus linguistics is more often than not associated with large-scale collections of spoken or written data, representing genres, varieties or contexts of use. Many of these have been successfully exploited for pragmatics research, producing generalised findings that hold across a range of texts. However, it may be argued that rather than stopping at generalised findings that note the frequency of pragmatic phenomena in large corpora, an important research agenda now foregrounds a focus on small corpora and local pragmatic patterns. This chapter will argue that smaller, carefully collected, context-specific corpora, both spoken and written, are of great import in pragmatics research. Many pragmatic features of language such as deixis or pragmatic markers play a fundamental role in communication, and, in these cases, are linguistically realised in the type of ‘small’ linguistic items that tend to be frequent in all corpora. Therefore, smaller corpora provide a platform for not only establishing the range and frequency of these items but the role of different genres or contexts in characterising their use. We will provide evidence for this in the form of two corpus case studies in order to illustrate how small corpora have created a practical and empirical route for the study of pragmatics, and how this synergy of small corpora and pragmatic research provides rich and contextualised findings.
51 citations
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TL;DR: This article presented an integrated literacy curriculum for special education students that was designed to promote classroom discourse for negotiating and constructing meanings in reading and reading comprehension for reading and writing for children with disabilities.
Abstract: In this article we present an integrated literacy curriculum for special education students that was designed to promote classroom discourse for negotiating and constructing meanings in reading and...
51 citations
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05 Jul 2013
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify the basic meaning of survey as "to examine an area of land in order to make a map of it" (MM3), which is a metaphorically used word.
Abstract: formal, academic one. The identification of the contextual meaning of this lexical item yields ‘[FORMAL] to study something’ (Macmillan’s sense no. 4, or MM4). In the next step we identify the basic meaning as ‘to examine an area of land in order to make a map of it’ (MM3). Since the latter is distinct from, but can be understood in comparison with, the contextual sense, survey is a metaphorically used word. There is a special feature of survey in this context. The tension between abstract and concrete is combined with a tension between non-human and human. That is, the contextual sense of survey has a selection restriction that requires a human agent in subject position, but this is violated by the appearance of a non-human agent. The dictionary provides an example included in the contextual sense (MM4): Professor Arens has surveyed a wide range of tribal cultures. It illustrates the semantic restriction of having to select a human agent for survey in the sense of ‘to study something’. This selection restriction is violated in our example sentence, and can be treated as a case of personification. Although personification of this kind seems to be rather typical of academic discourse, frequently being used for text management, there is a fine line between appropriate and inappropriate usage that cannot be transgressed without marking the language as stylistically deficient or conceptually unsound. Low (2005) shows that expressions like “this essay thinks” (which he relates to the conceptual mapping AN ESSAY IS A PERSON) are not accepted by experienced lecturers, while other cases, as we have seen, are perfectly acceptable. It should also be noted that the reported type of personification is closely tied to metonymy and is therefore substantially different from personifications like “each individual cell had to be master of all trades” (from an article in the popularized science journal New Scientist, identified by Low, 2005). The latter is a type of personification that seems to be used for distinct functions, such as explanation and entertainment (cf. Low, 2005). The next lexical item identified as related to metaphor is development. In previous discussions among the analysts, it had been classified as a borderline case. The decision to regard the item as borderline was most likely prompted by the analysts’ lexical knowledge about concrete instances of development, such as the growth of a plant. However, there is no such entry to be found in Macmillan. The dictionary rather lists a fairly universal meaning of development: ‘change, growth, or improvement over a period of time’ (MM1). The entry conflates the basic concrete meaning with more encompassing (‘growth of a child as time passes, as it 112 | C h a p t e r 4 changes and learns to do new things’, MM1a) and more abstract (‘improving the economy [...]’, MM1b) meanings. What is more, even the contextual meaning is subsumed under the universal meaning of MM1. Given this strong general sense of development, the lexical item was later re-analyzed as a non-metaphorical item. At the time of the reliability testing, however, the discussion of development was still pending. All analysts indicated their awareness of this status by assigning borderline status. The last metaphorical item included in this sentence is the preposition over. The contextual sense is ‘during a period of time’, which can be contrasted and metaphorically compared to ‘above someone/something’. All coders agreed on this comparison. Over is thus a maximally straightforward instance of metaphor. At this point, we can make the following observations about identifying metaphor in academic discourse. We observed that metaphor in academic writing often involves forms of personification (cf. Low, 1999). And, including rather than excluding borderline cases of metaphoricity is important for metaphor identification in academic registers, too. We will now turn to our treatment of a number of less clear cases. 4.2 Lack of Agreement 4.2.1 Metaphor identification and specialist terms: Metaphorical to whom? Our reliability tests show that academic texts (together with news texts) have the highest rate of unanimously identified metaphors of the four registers (cf. Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, Krennmayr, & Pasma, 2010). Most words related to metaphor found in our samples of academic discourse are straightforward cases of conventional metaphor. They are not ambiguous and they are a typical part of academic prose. But academic discourse also exhibits the highest proportion of coder disagreement. This seems to be related to one of the intrinsic qualities of many metaphors in academic discourse, their degree of specialization. There are a number of implications. The British National Corpus reflects the high level of specialization of academic discourse by differentiating between four sub-registers: humanities & arts, natural sciences, politics, law, & education, and social sciences. The fragments representing academic discourse belong to distinct sub-registers, which have their own specialized vocabulary. This is one axis of specialization. In addition, Biber (2006b) also distinguishes between various “academic levels (lower division, upper division, graduate)” (2006, p. 21). This categorization relates to different audiences using words (especially technical terms) with distinct levels of expertise. This is another M e t a p h o r i d e n t i f i c a t i o n i n a c a d e m i c d i s c o u r s e | 113 axis of specialization. Both types of specialization may cause problems for reliable metaphor identification. Each academic discipline has a specific technical language, which features many possible candidates for metaphorically related words. However, the detailed shades of meanings of technical languages are not part and parcel of the general reader’s lexical knowledge, and correspondingly, cases of disagreement in the reliability test were often from technical vocabulary. The technical meanings of words like scalar (from scalar function in electromagnetics, FEF-fragment02) are not frequent enough to figure in Macmillan. This is a special methodological problem of academic discourse, which at first glance does not seem to be resolved by MIPVU’s practice of consulting a usage-based dictionary to support coder decisions. To correctly establish the contextual meaning for technical terms like electrical charge or scalar function, analysts would need to gather information from more encompassing dictionaries, such as the OED, or genuinely specialized dictionaries. Our solution for dealing with cases like these was to adopt a general view on metaphor, which means that we assume a general reader. This reader’s knowledge about the meaning of words is taken to correspond with the entries in the Macmillan dictionary, or, as a fallback position, Longman (Summers & Bullon, 2005). Decisions should therefore not be based on etymological principles (charge) or solely on specialized dictionaries (scalar). We thus decided to stick to our general identification procedure, and base our decisions primarily on Macmillan. Since specialized terms do not appear in our dictionaries, and we deliberately did not include an additional step for assessing the specific contextual meaning of a lexical unit in the procedure, we cannot compare the exact contextual meaning to an assumed more basic meaning. However, just like the general language user, analysts do have intuitions about the approximate sense of a technical term, in particular about its abstractness and so on. Therefore, if the contextual sense of a specialized term is not in the dictionary, but there is a sense that fulfills our criteria of being basic, and that can be understood by comparison to the (assumed) contextual sense, we mark the word as a borderline case of metaphor (WIDLII) –“borderline” because we have not checked the contextual sense against a specialist dictionary. 4.2.2 Metaphor-related words and scientific models. In this section we will examine how our linguistic approach interacts with any knowledge we may have of the structure of underlying metaphorical scientific models. In particular, the question arises whether it can interfere with achieving unanimous agreement. One example of words that seem to indicate a scientific model is (electrical) charge: 114 | C h a p t e r 4 (2) It means that neither the magnitude nor the position of the charge varies as a function of time. (FEF-fragment02, emphasis mine, JBH) The contextual meaning is sense description 4 in Macmillan, ‘the amount of electricity that something holds or carries’, which is unproblematic. But when we have to identify the basic meaning of the word, it is difficult to make a decision. The summary for this entry looks like this: 1. amount of money to pay; 2. when sb [somebody, JBH] is accused; 3. an attack running fast; 4. amount of electricity; 5. amount of explosive; 6. sb you take care of; 7. ability to cause emotion. Longman provides no further information. Candidates for a basic meaning are the bodily-related ‘an attack by people or animals running very fast towards someone or something’ (MM3) and the concrete ‘an amount of the substance that makes a bomb explode’ (MM5). By adding the label WIDLII to our judgment that this word is related to metaphor, we can signal borderline status. We thereby account for the possibility that the general reader might judge one of these senses basic. The OED features the concrete, physical sense of ‘a (material) load, burden, weight’, which is now obsolete. It also provides us with the approximate date of the first usage of load in the electrical sense; this enables us to infer that, when the term was coined as part of a scientific model, the concrete, physical meaning was still part of the English lexicon. It is possible that today there is still available a model of electricity that works on the basis of an analogy between concrete material loads and less palpable
51 citations
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TL;DR: The paper finds that certain textual features, such as citation frequency, citation length, and citation location, as well as author‐stated reasons for citation predicted ratings of importance, but the strength of the relationship often depended on citation features in the article as a whole.
Abstract: Purpose – The present study aims to investigate how textual features, depth of citation treatment, reasons for citation, and relationships between citers and citees predict author‐rated citation importance.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 49 biology and 50 psychology authors assessed the importance, reason for citation, and relationship to the cited author for each cited reference in his or her own recently published empirical article. Participants performed their evaluations on individualized web‐based surveys.Findings – The paper finds that certain textual features, such as citation frequency, citation length, and citation location, as well as author‐stated reasons for citation predicted ratings of importance, but the strength of the relationship often depended on citation features in the article as a whole. The relationship between objective citation features and author‐rated importance also tended to be weaker for self‐citations.Research limitations/implications – The study sample included aut...
51 citations