The forbidden first word: Discourse functions and rhetorical patterns of and-prefacing in student essays
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Henna Makkonen-Craig
Henna Makkonen-Craig is Docent (Adjunct Professor) in Finnish at the University of Helsinki where she also received her PhD. She is curious about linguistic and discourse phenomena both in school and professional writing, and has published on topics such as writing fluency, dialogicity of written discourse, educational genres, participant-oriented metadiscourse and the Finnish dialogical passive. She was a contributor and co-editor in
Analysing text AND talk (2014). She has coached writers in public-sphere communications, and she currently works as a Senior Language Specialist at the Institute for the Languages in Finland.
Abstract
This article investigates and-prefacing and its environments in student essays. Specifically, the focus is on those instances when a writer uses the Finnish ja ‘and’ as an opening element (“preface”) to the sentence. While and-prefacing is most commonly a single-usage feature employed by a small minority of writers in the essay genre analyzed here, the detailed functional-rhetorical analysis reveals a rich picture of these usages and the respective discourse norm that emerges and evolves in practice. This paper identifies eight micro-level discourse functions for and-prefacing in the essays: (i) rhetorical, accumulative listing; (ii) emphasizing continuity of argument; (iii) dialogical aligning; (iv) unconventional intertextual linking; (v) evaluating a narrative turn; (vi) resolution; (vii) fantasy as coda; and (viii) plain cohesive linking. Significantly, and-prefacing is not limited to the failed essays, nor to the low-graded essays more generally. The differences found in high- and low-graded (failed) essays may, however, suggest that some discourse functions and rhetorical patterns are associated with a higher institutional value than others. Methodologically, this study highlights the benefits of Rich Feature Analysis and dialogically oriented linguistic discourse analysis for exploring a relatively infrequent and yet distinctive rhetorical resource that has a complex form-function relationship in student essays.
About the author
Henna Makkonen-Craig is Docent (Adjunct Professor) in Finnish at the University of Helsinki where she also received her PhD. She is curious about linguistic and discourse phenomena both in school and professional writing, and has published on topics such as writing fluency, dialogicity of written discourse, educational genres, participant-oriented metadiscourse and the Finnish dialogical passive. She was a contributor and co-editor in Analysing text AND talk (2014). She has coached writers in public-sphere communications, and she currently works as a Senior Language Specialist at the Institute for the Languages in Finland.
Acknowledgments
This research was financially supported by Emil Aaltonen Foundation. The author is grateful to Taru Nordlund, Irina Piippo, Susanna Shore, Anneli Kauppinen and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the manuscript.
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© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Towards multiple hyperTheme: Theme beyond the clause
- Monitoring the swimzone while finding south: sustained orientation in multiactivity among beach lifeguards
- The forbidden first word: Discourse functions and rhetorical patterns of and-prefacing in student essays
- Documenting knowledge mobilization: a quantitative analysis of citation and reported speech in a Canadian public inquiry
- The past is a foreign country: disputed memories and telling rights in co-narrated refugee stories
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Towards multiple hyperTheme: Theme beyond the clause
- Monitoring the swimzone while finding south: sustained orientation in multiactivity among beach lifeguards
- The forbidden first word: Discourse functions and rhetorical patterns of and-prefacing in student essays
- Documenting knowledge mobilization: a quantitative analysis of citation and reported speech in a Canadian public inquiry
- The past is a foreign country: disputed memories and telling rights in co-narrated refugee stories
