Volume 36, Issue 1 -

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government has proposed a number of reform initiatives in different policy areas since its establishment in 1997. This paper explores and discusses the HKSAR government’s discursive attempt to persuade the people of Hong Kong to accept two education policy reforms it has proposed. Adopting a corpus-based approach and drawing upon the construct of metadiscourse as the method of inquiry in the study, the author found that the HKSAR government had appealed to logos, ethos, and pathos with metadiscourse in the policy reform discourse in actualizing its persuasive attempts. The present study represents a modest attempt to analyze the policy document genre from a metadiscursive perspective and to inform writers of the genre of the possible ways to textualize the three means of persuasion – logos, ethos, and pathos – who will then be more aware of the resources that they can use to enhance the persuasiveness of their writing.

Metadiscourse has been conceptualized as a means to organize discourse, convey interpersonal and evaluative meanings, as well as engage the reader or listener. Importantly, metadiscourse has been theorized to uncover thought mediation during the essay-composing process. This study compares the metadiscourse in the reflective essays of 180 fifth graders, who either participated in small-group discussions using an approach called Collaborative Reasoning (CR), or who did not. Comparative analysis involving six major categories and forty subcategories of metadiscourse revealed, among other findings, that CR-exposed writers better signaled illocutionary force of reasoning, made greater use of engagement imperatives/directives and common-good rather than self-centered attitude marking. CR writers organized their ideas in a more argument-befitting logical-temporal non-list-like structure. Control students made greater use of emphatics, more often introduced hypothetical scenarios, and more frequently linked propositions together with simple additive conjunctions. The findings suggest that CR students have greater concern for how readers will take their arguments and greater appropriation of argument-enhancing formal elements, thus revealing cross-modal transfer from oral to written discourse.

Formulaic expressions are prefabricated chunks of language ubiquitous in everyday discourse and hence constitute an important aspect of communicative competence. They are frequently adopted or adapted to evoke intertextual associations that disrupt or defamiliarize the automatized formulaic frame, as in Home Smart Home . Such disrupted or defamiliarized formulaic expressions are referred to in this article as “formulaic intertexts,” which is an interesting discursive feature that has gone largely unnoticed in the literature. This article aims to explore formulaic intertexts across English newspapers in different pragmatic contexts. A textual survey and analysis were conducted on 1,681 full-length news stories to probe into the formulaic intertexts across the following six newspapers in their respective macro contexts: the China Post , the Gulf Daily News , The NY Times International Weekly , The New York Times , the Telegraph (Calcutta), and the Manchester Evening News . The exploration reveals noticeable linguistic and contextual features associated with the occurrence of a formulaic intertext, such as the scale of the newspaper, its target audience, different types of formulaic expressions, and different textual units of a news story. The survey and analysis have shed some light on the affordance between formulaic intertexts and the pragmatic contexts of the news stories.

Employing a systemic functional approach to the analysis of cohesive elements, this paper investigates the impact of recurrent propositions in texts on readers’ perceptions of their gist in a study of hard news and their summaries written by competent readers. The results show that the number of times propositions recur in news does not correspond to readers’ perceptions of their degrees of importance to the gist of news in which they occur, pointing to the limited role of repetition in identifying important propositions. This study also shows that two factors, namely the textual positions of propositions occurring in news, and the relationships between different propositions, played an important part when readers examined whether propositions were important to the gist of news in which they occur. The study complements the corpus-driven approaches to phraseology by extending the scope of phraseological combinations to include paraphrases and other semantic relations in the identification of identical and similar propositions recurring in individual texts.

Drawing on an analogy between discourse and syntactic trees, this paper chooses 359 Wall Street Journal articles with multiple paragraphs from the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) Discourse Treebank, and converts each discourse tree into three additional dependency ones, at discourse, paragraph and sentence levels, with exclusively elementary discourse units of clauses, sentences and paragraphs, respectively. It empirically tests and visually presents the genre-specific “summary+details” or “inverted pyramid” structuring of news discourse. It further extends the idea of inverted pyramid structuring to the paragraph and sentence levels. It proves that the body of the report also has a similar schematic top-down installment organization with macro-propositions on top. It also visually and statistically presents the rhetorical structures at sentence level, which differ to some extent from grammatical structures. Operated in line with the compositionality criterion and hierarchy principle of RST, the converted trees provide unique analytical advantages and constitute new research prospects.