The aim of the study reported in this article was to identify the knowledge or skills deficits which make Polish students of foreign languages fail to understand specialised discourse written in their second language (L2). The author analysed the translations proposed by French philology students for a fragment of a French academic text, particularly the translation errors consisting in source text’s meaning transformation (i.e. misinterpretation, incorrect meaning, nonsense). The analysis allows to assume that these errors are the direct result of insufficient knowledge of the L2 in connection with wrong techniques of words’ meaning verification.
In the article the authors analyze the problems of intercultural contact in written communication on the basis of bilingual scientific texts, such as scientific study, collection of scientific papers and lesson book. The ways of transfer of verbal and nonverbal (paragraphic) elements are discussed with consideration for such parameters of the communicative situation, as addressee, self-positioning of redactor or author of the text and publishing tradition.
In the article is taken the issue of condition of pedagogy as a research field and academic discipline. Many critical researchers and analytics arrives at a conclusion that there is a crisis of: school, higher education, upbringing, teacher’s role, educational system etc. Thus, we face common demand of changes, adaptation, reorganization, modernization, emancipation of/for/towards that what is placed within the field of pedagogy. Fundamental questions about the scientific nature and paradigmaticness of pedagogy are being moved to the further plan and giving up place to the questions about: the state of the pedagogy/pedagogics, the quality of problems considered by it and its ability/readiness to solve those problems.
In the paper the pros and cons of expressing an author’s personality in academic style have been analyzed. The idea that extremely depersonalized academic texts incur considerable stylistic losses has been defended. The necessity of presenting a well-balanced expression of an author’s personality has been proved.
The study examines the role that exemplification plays in academic discourse. As the latest approaches emphasize, discourse is an interactional activity involving as participants both the writer and the reader. In order to ensure the proper understanding of his/her message, writers make use of different discourse strategies such as reformulation, specification, generalization or elaboration. We focus on how exemplification, viewed as the satellite, contributes to the better recognition of the subject matter, which is understood as the nucleus. In the first two sections of the study, we present an overview of discourse relations which call for the use of constructions applied in exemplification. The second part, which is based on the linguistic material obtained from a close scrutiny of two classic articles from the field of linguistics and one linguistic textbook, is devoted to the description of how exemplification contributes to specification and elaboration. We try to find and describe the specific relations, for example set-member, whole-part, process-step and object-attribute which hold between the nucleus and the satellite. Finally, we attempt at listing discourse areas which call for exemplification. The study illustrates that what are known as separate discourse relations are in fact closely related.
The article refers to the theory of colour, the theory of perception, contemporary media morphosis and the postulates of multimedia stylistics. The author undertakes the presented deliberations for two reasons. Perception, remembering and learning are important for the teaching process at the university regardless of the passage of time. Both the lecturer and the student are interested in the effective acquisition of content. Multimodality as an attribute of the prevailing products of contemporary culture should be the subject of interest for discourse linguistics. The author’s research goal is to examine the effectiveness of font colours used in academic Power Point slides. In a multimedia presentation as a form of a lecture, a public reception takes place, alongside listening with reading and watching. The synergy of the spoken word and the bit-based text occurs. The author puts forward the claim that colour can be a factor in supporting or losing the listener’s directional attention. The second claim is that a colourful area, or a background for a printed text, is different from the colour of the font used in a text that students are required to read and watch from a distance. When the lecturer stands in front of the audience, they can manage its attention through various means. One of them is visualization in the form of the font colour choice within the slide. The article is a proposal of a certain type of research, but the author also presents the results of an experiment. Its results allow to reject the dominant role of the text placed on the slide. Some students correctly recalled the information conveyed only in the spoken form.
The main aim of this article is to analyze repair signals in German and Polish spoken texts. The repair signals are features which allow speaker to rearrange the framework of the utterance. Texts selected from the GeWiss corpus (https://gewiss.uni-leipzig.de/) are the empirical basis of this research. The following textual units will be analyzed: exclamations, tokens and phrases that introduce repairs in spontaneous spoken academic discourse.
This paper reports on a comparative study performed in the field of Corpus Linguistics. The objective of the research was to analyze the distributional pattern of interactive and interactional metadiscourse features in two modes of academic spoken and written English. For this reason, a list of metadiscourse characteristics was gathered. By using the Sketch engine software, all the words were scrutinized in the corpus and their concordance lines were analyzed one by one in both corpora (British Academic Written English Corpus and British Academic Spoken English Corpus). As the data can show, in both corpora, the general propensity of the authors was towards the interactive metadiscourse features. In addition, in the written corpus, the transitions and endophoric markers were used more often; while in the spoken, endophoric markers and transitions were the most frequently applied metadiscourse features. In the interactional metadiscourse features, hedges and self-mentions were the most frequent in the written form; whereas in the spoken, self-mentions and boosters were used moe often.
The text presents an analysis of three Polish herbariums from the period of the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries as examples representing the ancient academic discourse. The presented considerations allow for maintaining the claim about the cultural aspect of Polish academic discourse in the distant past. The texts which represent it are the source of the information about the state of the knowledge in chosen domains and dis- ciplines. Moreover, they constitute the reflection of the knowledge itself in its practi- cal use described in the herbariums, which is a peculiar feature of old Polish academic texts. Justified, then, is the claim that these analysed texts and their discourse are aca- deming in nature, of course on condition that one takes into account their historical context. Apart from the professional awareness of the time, one notices certain strate- gies for constructing the texts and their discourse which prove the academic discourse. Features such as precision, objectivity, argument problematisation etc. were developed and strengthened in subsequent centuries.
The main focus of the present paper is to show how vague language categories can function as a face-saving strategy. The observations made in this article are based on the analysis of one category of vague language, that is, quantifiers in British and American spoken academic discourse. The data used for the present investigation have been obtained from two corpora: the sub-corpus of educational events of the British National Corpus and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken Discourse. The results suggest that quantifiers as a face-saving strategy are used when self-criticism or criticism towards others is expressed. They are often employed in apologies, promises, self-justifications, when giving advice and in cases of uncertainty. Both students and teachers use quantifiers in these situations, but in teachers' speech they are of special importance, since teachers, if they want to maintain their authority, are especially conscious of their positive face. Paucal quantifiers especially frequently function as a face-saving device since they have a mitigating effect. The use of quantifiers as mitigators is especially evident in those instances where they occur in negative contexts. Such instances demonstrate that the main difference between the two varieties under investigation is that in BE quantifiers significantly more frequently function as mitigators. Finally, it has been observed that quantifiers frequently occur alongside other means of self-distancing and face-saving in both varieties.
This paper reports on an analysis of litotes in English research articles from two distant fields, life and social sciences. As a device for understatement, litotes denies the semantic opposite of what is meant to mitigate the literal content of the utterance. This feature makes litotes a useful means of academic communication which should remain cautious in tone and impartial. However, the results of the analysis reveal disciplinary variation in the frequency, structural types and syntactic functions of such constructions in the considered discipline-specific expert writing. The social sciences texts use twice as many litotes as the life sciences texts, and show a greater functional variation of litotes. There are also dissimilarities in the specific patterns by means of which the analysed structural types of litotes are realised.
This article investigates writer-reader interaction in L2 (Czech) learner academic discourse with a specific focus on reader engagement in English-medium Master’s theses in the humanities. The study draws on Hyland and Jiang’s (2016) model of engagement. It aims to reveal how Czech graduates use features of engagement (such as reader reference, appeals to shared knowledge, directives and questions) to establish solidarity with readers by acknowledging their presence and negotiating potential alternative views. The contrastive corpus-based analysis compares a corpus of Czech English-medium Master’s theses with two reference L1 corpora representing learner and published academic discourse to explore the impact of linguacultural background, expertise and discipline on the frequency of use and functions of engagement markers. The findings suggest notable variations in the realization patterns and functions of engagement markers across the corpora. It is observed that Czech graduates tend to underuse reader reference and questions, while overusing directives. Moreover, they generally struggle to approximate disciplinary patterns of engagement markers. This trend might reflect students’ limited awareness of academic rhetorical conventions, their efforts to blend L1 and L2 academic norms, and the unique context of addressing an audience within the examination framework of the Master’s thesis.
This article sets out to present the critical role of positioning theory and social identification theory in the discoursal analysis of authorial presence in academic texts by focusing on the dynamic nature of writer identity. Drawing on Harré’s, Fairclough’s and Hall’s work, and my own focus on the relationship between students’ identities and their experience of academic writing, I claim that discoursal identity often establishes itself in relation to difference and that it refers to the various “selves” which writers employ in the act of writing, which locates identity in socio-cultural and institutionally defined subject positions. An empirical case is then presented. It consists of a description of my own semi-ethnographic study1 on the co-construction of authorial identity in student writing in both English and Polish, focusing on the findings of the macro-level analysis of a text corpus. The findings of the study support my other claim that authorial identity is a dynamic concept which cannot be determined entirely by socio-cultural or institutional factors, but is unique for each writer and can be negotiated and changed.
In the Italian academic discourse research, Master’s degree theses used to be studied mainly from the perspective of linguistic competencies of their authors. However, strictly linguistic skills are not the only challenge for undergraduate, who must also convey intellectual content in appropriate discursive and rhetorical forms. The paper explores the patterns of a peculiar form of “collaborative writing”, i.e. the cooperation between the thesis supervisor and the student. Using the example of Master’s theses in lin- guistics, written in Italian as a foreign language, three basic didactic approaches are discussed in the paper. In the didactics of content the supervisors emphasize knowledge, i.e. linguistic concepts expected to be applied in a Master’s thesis. In the didactics of forms, the supervisors focus on the linguistic code, that is, on grammatical and lexical correctness of the Master’s thesis. In the didactics of forms of content the supervisors use regularities observed in academic discourse, such as genre and rhetorical structures, as valuable teaching resources likely to help students develop metacommunicative awareness.
The article focuses on blogs related to research activities of the academic community. Research-related blogs as components of university websites have developed into an array of sub-genres shaped by specific foci, their authors and the desired audiences. The data set consists of fifty posts from ten blogs of six universities. Drawing upon Swales’ methodology of genre analysis, the study explores the generic structure of the blog posts, reveals the communicative purposes they can fulfil within the landscape of university websites, identifies significant communication strategies, and explores the roles the blogs may serve in communicating science to the diverse audiences they potentially address. The analysis has shown that the blogs help accomplish the general goals of informing about the university and promoting it providing a personalized view and engaging the reader, manifest loose but recurrent generic structuring, and can be vehicles of knowledge dissemination as well as knowledge construction.
The paper discusses the preliminary results of a pilot exploratory study concerning on-record politeness strategies used by academics to soften criticism of scientific performance of other scholars and deal with judgmental opinions in relation to their own research findings. The study uses the apparatus offered by the politeness theory to get insight into the trans-cultural writer-reader communication in written academic discourse, namely, in reply to/response to articles. Methodologically, the study draws from the classic framework of linguistic politeness (Brown and Levinson [1978]/1987) with reformulations (Bousfield 2008) in order to identify ways of showing polite (dis)agreement in academic writing (Myers 1989; 1992). The paper focuses on the general selection of and preference towards particular on-record politeness strategies used for conflict management (mitigation, resolution) and face redress in replies to.
A lecture as a genre can be analyzed as a ritual form of performance with its interactional order. A traditional lecture is a regulated speech act and the body of a researcher is not an essential carrier of meanings. Multimedia presentations change a role of researcher’s body but only the postmodern turn and new paradigm in ethnography treats the body as an integral part of the research process. The first part of the article focuses on the main features of the academic lecture as a discursive genre. In the second part of the text, methodological assumptions of performative ethnography will be discussed together with its main functions and criteria for evaluation.
PL
Wykład jako gatunek można analizować jako zrytualizowaną formę wystąpienia scenicznego, w którym obowiązuje określony porządek interakcyjny. W tradycyjnej formie wykład jest przede wszystkim uregulowanym aktem mówienia, a ciało badacza nie jest istotnym nośnikiem znaczeń. Wraz z pojawieniem się prezentacji multimedialnych ciało badacza zaczyna odgrywać rolę, jednakże dopiero etnografia performatywna traktuje ciało badacza jako integralną część procesu badawczego. W pierwszej części artykułu omówione zostały główne cechy wykładu akademickiego jako gatunku dyskursywnego. Następnie przedstawiono główne założenia metodologiczne wykładu performatywnego w kontekście paradygmatu postmodernistycznego, jego główne funkcje i kryteria ewaluacji.
This paper addresses the issue of authorial presence in contemporary academic discourse. It considers factors influencing authorial presence choices and compares traditional assumptions to current practice in writing academic articles. While exploring the hypothesis that recently there has been a shift from the so-called scientific paradigm established by academic writing style guides to a more subjective mode of academic writing, the study discusses the results of a corpus-based research into authorial presence choices in a corpus of research articles in applied linguistics written by native speakers of English. The findings of the investigation show that the authors exploit various rhetorical functions of author-reference pronouns for maintaining the writer-reader relationship and construing an authoritative authorial voice. The paper also reports the results of a cross-cultural investigation into the ways Anglo-American linguists and Czech linguists approach writer-reader interaction and manifest their authorial voice. It suggests that the lower rate and limited range of functions of author-reference pronouns used by Czech linguists can be explained by their non-native speaker status and the influence of the Czech academic writing literacy.
Inspired by Strugielska’s (2012) article “Alternate Construals of Source and Target Domains in Conceptual Metaphor,” where the linguist presents a number of arguments questioning applicability of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) to the analysis of linguistic meaning, I attempt to reanalyze some of the arguments through reference to primary sources: Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoff (1990), Kövecses (2000, 2002, 2005, 2011). The issues of direct concern are: dichotomous nature of conceptual domains and their assumed discretness, the issue of differentiating the conceptual structure form the semantic structure and cognitive metaphorical projections from the relation of categorization, the question of monosemy constraint and degree of informativeness of metaphorical projections. The issues are discussed in the source article in the context of works whose authors question validity of CMT on the basis of (naturally occurring) language data from corpora. My own reanalysis of the examples discussed exhibit the extent to which metaphorical projections between the source and the target domains can provide motivations for the language expressions, accounting for their metaphoricity. At the same time, employing analytic tools available within Cognitive Grammar, I demonstrate that the extent of the contribution of metaphorical projections to respective semantic structures is determined by the position of the source domain in the matrix of the respective profile/base alignment.
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