Volume 35, Issue 3 -

Although much has been written about the features of academic writing, there is a lack of research attention on macro issues related to the development of ideas, particularly in the writing of research articles. A concept that is useful in investigating such issues is the Hallidayan notion of theme. However, the thematic structure of research articles has received only modest attention over the years. It is also rare for thematic diagrams to be used even though they can be helpful in clarifying the thematic structure of the text. In this exploratory study, the patterning of topical themes in research articles was investigated using a diagrammatic approach. Twenty biology-related research articles were divided into t-units and analyzed for topical themes. Thematic diagrams were generated for all the articles. The diagrams revealed a progressive thematic pattern in the introduction sections of all the articles. At the whole-text level, an anchored-development pattern was observed in the majority of the articles. These findings suggest that research articles at the macro level share similarities in their thematic structure. They also shed light on how authors achieve focus in the writing through the systematic use of clause-initial elements.

The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was founded in 1665 by Henry Oldenburg. This article analyzes the domains of study and most frequent genres present in the items published in the year 1675. This provides part of the background necessary for the understanding of these scientific texts from a former period. The fields most frequently encountered are those of astronomy and physics. The subjects treated in the domain of astronomy are dependent on the celestial events that took place that year. Those in the area of physics are determined by the interests of a few eminent scientists such as Robert Boyle and Denis Papin. The incidence of agricultural items is due to the intellectual heritage of Francis Bacon. Less frequent are the areas of medicine, biology, botany, and geography. Among the less common fields, such as geology and technology, items concerning watches are significant, because of their importance to solving the longitude problem. Fields covered uniquely by book reviews, such as language, economics, and architecture, are more marginal to the interests of the journal’s readership.

This article compares the metaphorical representations of the currency dispute between China and the United States in two newspapers, i.e., China Daily (CD) from China and The New York Times (NYT) from the United States, in order to investigate the role of conceptual metaphors in framing the dispute and constructing the argumentative position and ideological stance of each newspaper. The findings suggest that while five dominant metaphor themes can be identified in both newspapers: physical movement, physical conflict/war, health/strength, victim , and machine , they are appropriated and reformulated in different ways to construct the argumentative position and ideological stance of each newspaper. NYT prefers to frame the dispute as a physical conflict and the Renminbi as a victim of government control and manipulation and argues for the overhaul of the machine of China’s exchange rate policies. CD favors the conceptualization of the dispute as a war and the Renminbi as a scapegoat for the problems of the United States and insists on the adjustment of the machine of China’s exchange rate policies.

This study examines the use of words and phrases that signal metaphors in three genres in order to further examine the corpus-based evidence for signaling variation mentioned in previous research. While previous studies have focused on pragmatic functions, discourse functions, and the level of conventionalization, this study demonstrates that the communicative goals within each genre underlie the reasons for the metaphor signaling. Three corpora of approximately 600,000 words were created for this research, and they were made up of US presidential addresses, popular science articles, and business periodical articles. The corpora were electronically queried for the use of sixteen previously identified metaphor signals in order to obtain comparable quantitative data. The study was complemented by a qualitative analysis of the identified instances of signaled metaphors. We found that three metaphor signal categories – copular similes, verbal processes, and modals/conditionals – accounted for the large majority of the signals analyzed in the genres. Furthermore, we found that while copular similes and verbal processes signals were used for different rhetorical purposes, depending on the communicative goals of each genre, the conditional signal was always used to foreshadow metaphorically expressed possibilities, regardless of the genre in which it was used.

This paper addresses how to identify and code lexical items which explicitly realize attitudinal meaning. Such items are the kind of linguistic resources about whose coding discourse analysts feel confident (Martin 2003), but these have unfortunately received less scholarly attention than indirect realizations of attitudinal meaning such as metaphors and factual statements. In the process of annotating a small-scale corpus of 15 short stories published in English, it is observed that words with connotation, which are not regarded attitudinal lexis, also express opinions; some lexical items make hybrid realizations of logically related attitudinal meanings; and some verbs, traditionally called speech act terms, construe attitudinal meaning in a different way. Drawing on data collected from the small-scale corpus, this paper firstly proposes a distinction between typical realization and combinational realization of attitudinal meaning to account for the differences between attitudinal lexis and words with connotation; and then puts forward two further distinctions between independent and correlational realization and between projected and projecting realization of attitudinal meaning. This helps to explain the differences between lexical items realizing one attitudinal meaning and words realizing two attitudinal meanings, and between verbs that indicate speech behavior and other lexical items which do not.

Group membership is central to social interaction. Within peer groups, social hierarchies and affiliations are matters to which members seriously attend (Corsaro 2014). Studies of peer groups highlight how status is achieved through oppositional actions. This paper examines the way in which competition and collaboration in a children’s peer group accomplishes status during the production and management of “second stories” (Sacks 1992). We present analysis of the interaction of young boys in a preparatory year playground who are engaged in a single instance of storytelling “rounds.” Analysis highlights the pivotal role of members’ contributions, assessments, and receipts in a series of second stories that enact a simultaneously competitive and collaborative local order.