Volume 38, Issue 3 -

This paper considers issues related to the textual organization of university lectures and the degree to which they are comprised of conventionalized text-organizational schema or genre stagings. It utilizes a dataset of video recordings and transcripts of four social science lectures which were delivered by two lecturers at a university in Japan in 2003, and offers findings which demonstrate that lecturers draw on a range of ready-made genres of the type which have been described in the so-called Sydney school genre literature and combine these conventionalized genres into genre complexes, which appear not to be conventionally or predictably ordered. The paper also offers some insights into at least one aspect of the distinction between online (spontaneous/spoken) versus offline (prepared/written) language. Specifically, it shows that lectures, as instances of spoken, apparently extemporaneous language do, to a significant degree, rely on pre-fabricated and culturally recurrent textual arrangements which the speakers draw on as they spontaneously produce the current communicative event.

In 2015, the World Health Organization published a report on the carcinogenicity of red and processed meat (IARC, 2015. Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat. The Lancet Oncology 16(16). 1599–1600), attracting intense interest from both the general public and the scientific community. This study combines corpus approaches, Systemic Functional Linguistics and discourse analysis to investigate and compare scientific and animal rights movement reactions to the IARC 2015 report. Scientific reactions are exemplified by three research papers published immediately after the report; responses from animal rights campaigners are investigated through an analysis of texts taken from the website of the nongovernmental organization PETA. The aim is to explore how discourse not only describes, but also constructs meat carcinogenicity, in texts produced by two discourse communities (scientists and animal campaigners) which, for entirely different reasons, have an important stake in this issue. Qualitative (close reading) and quantitative (corpus-based) methods are combined, focusing on vocabulary, grammatical metaphor, and Appraisal (Martin, Jim and Peter White, 2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). The results show a high level of hybridity, discursive erasure (Stibbe, Arran, 2012. Animals erased: discourse, ecology, and reconnection with the natural world . Middletown: Wesleyan University Press), and some substantial differences in the discourse reactions to the IARC report by the two sources, reflecting the ideologies and ethical assumptions they espouse in their approach to the announcement that red and processed meat can cause cancer.

This study is a corpus-driven examination of frequent lexical words and keywords in the news texts related to the American Dream and the Chinese Dream. Based on Sinclair’s (Sinclair, John McHardy. 2004. Trust the Text . Routledge: London) five categories of co-selection as framework, it discusses the patterns of co-selection across the corpora of news texts, with a particular focus on the cumulative effects of the co-construction of situated meanings and establishment of ideological positions associated with the two dreams. The corpus linguistic tool Wordsmith is used to generate frequent words and keywords for detailed concordance analysis along both syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations in order to indicate collocation, colligation, semantic preference, and semantic prosody. The findings demonstrate the individualistic home, work and education associations of the American Dream versus the collectivistic attributions of the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. The study not only confirms different cultural practices, but also reveals different social-historical conditions, and political influences associated with media representations of the American Dream and the Chinese Dream.

This study explores the rhetorical structure and linguistic features of research article abstracts in an applied discipline. Recently, many emerging applied disciplines have evolved to incorporate knowledge from a variety of disciplinary areas. Therefore, the writing style may vary within one discipline. While most studies have compared rhetorical variations between disciplines, few have examined sub-disciplinary variations. The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which variations exist among research article abstracts in three sub-fields of one applied discipline: marine engineering. A small specific corpus consisting of 60 marine engineering abstracts was compiled. By examining similarities and differences in the rhetorical structure, frequently used verbs, tense, and the use of first person pronouns, the analysis showed that sub-disciplinary variations existed among the three sub-fields. For example, the abstracts in the sub-field of automatic control (a discipline closely related to electronic engineering) differ from the abstracts of the other two sub-fields as for rhetorical structure, verb tense, and frequency of use of first-person pronouns. The findings of this study indicate that English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instructors should take into account sub-disciplinary preferences when teaching academic writing so that students can make informed choices when writing in their specific sub-field.

Self-citations are a familiar, if sometimes controversial, element of academic knowledge construction and reputation-building, contributing to both the cumulative nature of academic research and helping writers to promote their scientific authority and enhance their careers. As scholarly publications become more specialized, more collaborative and more important for promotion and tenure, we might expect self-citation to play a more visible role in published research and this paper explores this possibility. Here we trace patterns of self-citation in papers from the same five journals in four disciplines at three time periods over the past 50 years, selected according to their impact ranking in 2015. We identify a large increase in self-citations although this is subject to disciplinary variation and tempered by a huge rise in citations overall, so that self-citation has fallen as a proportion of all citations. We attempt to account for these changes and give a rhetorical explanation for authorial practices.

Discursive approaches to metaphor recognize that different social contexts and discourse activities will influence metaphor use. Using a descriptive text written by a participant with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as a case study, we demonstrate how, in a research context, metaphors do not only serve a representational function but they can also build relationships between the researcher and the participant, create a persuasive piece of writing and construct multiple identities. Through an analysis of metaphors and their surrounding, non-metaphorical co-text, it is thus argued that studies exploring metaphor in elicited research data need to integrate considerations of the research context into their analyses to a greater extent. We also show how a discourse dynamics approach to metaphor can be combined with a systemic-functional approach to register in order to capture both the discursive functions of metaphors and their emergence as the text progresses.