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: Comparisons of linguistic features of test essays written by native and non-native speakers with a comparison corpus of successful student writing across a range of disciplines using Biber's (1988) multidimensional analysis framework demonstrate that test essays differed in significant ways from disciplinary writing.
39 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the overwhelming dominance of English as a lingua franca in the academic domain is having an insidious effect upon other languages, leading to the curtailment or erosion of their traditional scholarly discourses.
Abstract: The overwhelming dominance of English as a lingua franca in the academic domain is having an insidious effect upon other languages, leading to the curtailment or erosion of their traditional scholarly discourses. Translators are often unwitting agents in this process, whether they are translating into or out of English. In the first case, market forces ensure that texts written by foreign academics need to be thoroughly domesticated to ensure acceptance by international journals, a process that sometimes involves the destruction of the entire epistemological infrastructure of the original. In the second, the prestige of the source language often means that English rhetorical patterns are calqued upon the target language. To date, little attention has been given to these matters in training translators. This paper suggests ways in which these issues may be confronted in translator training programmes. The aim is to alert trainees to the ideological issues involved in academic translation, and equip...
39 citations
01 Jan 2004
TL;DR: Analytical and empirical investigations are carried out with the aim of investigating which factors that affect the behaviour and performance of automatic indexing and retrieval techniques given that references and citations are an integrated part of the document representation of scientific full text documents in the IR system.
Abstract: The objective of the present dissertation work is to investigate the use of references and citations as an integrated part of automatic indexing and retrieval techniques operating on scientific full text documents. There are two main motivations behind the dissertation: Firstly, the few scattered studies from both the system-driven and the useroriented tradition that have investigated references and citations for information retrieval (IR) purposes, have generally shown promising results. Secondly, scientific documents are for the first time becoming available in large quantities in electronic form. This offers new possibilities for combining conventional automatic indexing and retrieval techniques with the exploitation of references and citations in IR. Analytical and empirical investigations are carried out with the aim of investigating which factors that affect the behaviour and performance of automatic indexing and retrieval techniques given that references and citations are an integrated part of the document representation of scientific full text documents in the IR system. It is investigated why references and citations might be useful in IR in an analytical review of the literature on citer motivations and citation behaviour. A normative and a social constructivist position on the motives of authors in citing other work is identified. The most unifying theoretical explanation is found to Small’s (1978) notion of references as ‘concept symbols’ that stand for an idea or concept that is being used in the course of an argument. This explanation is found attractive from the point of exploiting references and citations in IR, because regardless of whether or not some references are omitted, forgotten, biased etc. the references actually given function as symbols for a concept. This can explain why references and citations are useful in IR: Because the references represent concepts when used for document representation, they are well-suited for IR purposes as long as the user’s information need can be expressed in the same concepts, i.e., as seed documents. A review of earlier studies which have employed references and citations showed that the most common use of them for IR purposes was as seed documents in a forward chaining, where documents that refer to the seed document are retrieved. The ability of these seed documents to express the user’s information need was found to be the main factor affecting the behaviour and performance of references and citations in IR.
39 citations
01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: The authors examine the use of vague category markers as a marker of in-group membership in discourse communities, where speakers refer obliquely to other members of categories which they assume their listeners will be able to fill in.
Abstract: Carter and McCarthy (2006, p. 202) assert that VL expressions are a strong indication of an assumed shared knowledge and that they mark in-group membership, in so far as the referents of vague expressions can be assumed to be known by the listener. This is consistent with Cutting (2000), who illustrates how discourse communities use VL as a marker of in-group membership. It is this interactive aspect of VL that we will focus on in this chapter. We examine one particular manifestation of vagueness: the creation of vague category markers (hereafter VCMs), such as ‘university courses and that sort of thing’; ‘I’ve got to wash my hair and everything’, where speakers refer obliquely to other members of categories which they assume their listeners will be able to ‘fill in’. In extract (1) from an everyday conversation at a family dinner table (taken from the Limerick Corpus of Irish English, hereafter LCIE), where the participants are talking about someone who has taken a job at a local fast-food restaurant, one of the speakers throws out an ad hoc category (Barsalou 1983, 1987):
(1)
Speaker 1: And what’s he going to be doing in there?
Speaker 2: I think they’re training him as a trainee manager.
Speaker 3: You mean he’s frying chips. Basically.
Speaker 1: Frying chips?
Speaker 2: He says ‘I’m going to do everything. Fry chips and wait tables and stuff’.
Speaker 1: … there’s no way he’ll be able for that like
38 citations
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: The problem of automatically classifying academic citations in scientific articles according to author affect is addressed, using machine learning from indicators of affect and presentation of ownership of ideas to improve citation indexing.
Abstract: We address the problem of automatically classifying academic citations in scientific articles according to author affect. There are many ways how a citation might fit into the overall argumentation of the article: as part of the solution, as rival approach or as flawed approach that justifies the current research. Our motivation for this work is to improve citation indexing. The method we use for this task is machine learning from indicators of affect (such as “we follow X in assuming that…”, or “in contrast to Y, our system solves this problem”) and of presentation of ownership of ideas (such as “We present a new method for…”, or “They claim that…”). Some of these features are borrowed from Argumentative Zoning (Teufel and Moens, 2002), a technique for determining the rhetorical status of each sentence in a scientific article. These features include the type of subject of the sentence, the citation type, the semantic class of main verb, and a list of indicator phrases. Evaluation will be both intrinsic and extrinsic, involving the measurement of human agreement on the task and a comparison of human and automatic evaluation, as well as a comparison of task-performance with our system versus task performance with a standard citation indexer (CiteSeer, Lawrence et al., 1999).
38 citations