Startseite Linguistik & Semiotik Engagement and strategic alignment in academic talks across languages and disciplines
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Engagement and strategic alignment in academic talks across languages and disciplines

  • Yuxiang Duan

    Yuxiang Duan is a PhD researcher in linguistics at Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). Her research interests include corpus-assisted discourse analysis and intercultural pragmatics.

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    , Yaohua Luo

    Yaohua Luo is a Professor of Chinese linguistics at Central China Normal University. He has led 8 projects funded by the National Social Science and the Ministry of Education. Additionally, he has (co-)authored four scholarly monographs and translated one. His research interests include grammaticalization and language variation, the syntax-semantics of the Chinese language, construction grammar, and discourse and pragmatics.

    und Elisabeth Degand

    Elisabeth Degand is a full Professor of General linguistics at Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). She has led and participated in several international and national research projects in the areas of spoken and written discourse structure, grammaticalization and inter-subjectification, and discourse processing. Her research interests include spoken discourse segmentation, the semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers, and contrastive (corpus) linguistics.

Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 19. November 2025

Abstract

Engagement strategies in academic talks highlight how speakers position and manage their target audience, facilitating the effective communication of their academic stances. The present study investigates engagement strategies in academic talks delivered in L1 Mandarin Chinese and two varieties of English: L1 English and English as a lingua franca (ELF). Three corpora comprising 90 academic talks in the humanities and social sciences serve as the basis for analysis. The overarching findings underscore the prominence of hearer-mentions as the predominant form of engagement markers, with L1 English speakers notably favouring the combined use of hearer-mentions and directives to foster engagement with their audience. In comparison, L1 Mandarin speakers exhibit a proclivity towards using questions and directives as primary tactics for audience management and ELF scholars frequently incorporate knowledge appeals into their academic talks, while the use of personal-asides remains relatively infrequent. Moreover, the disciplinary nuances suggest that the choice of engagement markers may be influenced by specific disciplinary conventions and linguacultural variations. The findings not only contribute to a comparative analysis of academic spoken performance across diverse linguistic backgrounds and disciplines, but are also of potential interest to inform future speech training by adjusting and applying these strategies in communication.


Corresponding author: Yuxiang Duan, School of Foreign Languages, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, 116026, China; and Institut Langage et Communication, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, E-mail:

About the authors

Yuxiang Duan

Yuxiang Duan is a PhD researcher in linguistics at Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). Her research interests include corpus-assisted discourse analysis and intercultural pragmatics.

Yaohua Luo

Yaohua Luo is a Professor of Chinese linguistics at Central China Normal University. He has led 8 projects funded by the National Social Science and the Ministry of Education. Additionally, he has (co-)authored four scholarly monographs and translated one. His research interests include grammaticalization and language variation, the syntax-semantics of the Chinese language, construction grammar, and discourse and pragmatics.

Elisabeth Degand

Elisabeth Degand is a full Professor of General linguistics at Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). She has led and participated in several international and national research projects in the areas of spoken and written discourse structure, grammaticalization and inter-subjectification, and discourse processing. Her research interests include spoken discourse segmentation, the semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers, and contrastive (corpus) linguistics.

  1. Research funding: This study has been supported by the major funding project of the National Social Science Fund of China (The Construction of the Lexicon for Discourse Markers in Historical Chinese and Relevant Theoretical Studies; No. 24&ZD250).

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Received: 2024-03-21
Accepted: 2025-09-18
Published Online: 2025-11-19
Published in Print: 2026-01-23

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 24.1.2026 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/text-2024-0070/pdf
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