XXXIV Aedean Conference (Almería 2010)
PANEL: PRAGMATICS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (Coordinator: Fiona MacArthur)
SESSION 1
The Function of actually in American Academic Written Language: A Corpus Study
María del Pilar Ron Vaz (University of Huelva)
A Qualitative Cross-Cultural Analysis of Negation as a Critical Speech Act
Oana María Carciu (University of Zaragoza)
Managing Interaction with Readers in English and Spanish Opinion Columns: A Corpus-Based Study
María Pérez Blanco (University of Leon)
SESSION 2
South Park: Yeah, Yeah, We Get the Picture
Antonia Sánchez Macarro and Nicolás Pino James (University of Valencia)
Text-internal and Text-external Features of Disciplinary Discourses: A Preliminary Corpus-Based Study
Concepción Orna Montesinos (University of Zaragoza)
Socio-Political Digital Storytelling as Critical Device
Carmen Gregori Signes (University of Valencia)
PRAGMATICS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
ABSTRACTS
The Function of actually in American Academic Written Language: A Corpus Study
María del Pilar Ron Vaz (University of Huelva)
In recent years, there has been a clear interest in the study of the linguistic means through which speakers express their values, emotions and judgments, that is, in the expression of stance, in a variety of registers including academic language (Biber 2006a, b; Biber & Finegan 1988, Biber & Finegan 1989, Biber et al. 1999, Conrad & Biber 2000, inter alia). These studies have benefited from the use of corpora as a research methodology but, more often than not, have grouped together major types of stance adverbs or have not clearly distinguished between different types of register or text type. In the present study we will do a corpus analysis of a specific epistemic stance adverb, actually, as it appears in academic writing. We will draw our data from the Corpus of American Contemporary English (Davis 2008) which, in its academic section, has almost 80 million words. We will show that actually, in all three functions previously reported in the literature, is a productive resource in academic writing and that, although there seems to be a correlation between position and function in the case of clause initial or parenthetical actually, no such correlation has been found in other positions in the clause.
Keywords: actually, stance, epistemic, expectation marker, academic writing
A Qualitative Cross-Cultural Analysis of Negation as a Critical Speech Act
Oana María Carciu (University of Zaragoza)
Recent contrastive rhetoric studies have paid considerable attention to the rhetorical practices of nonnative English (Spanish) scholars publishing their research in English-medium international journals (Burgess, 2002; Martin-Martin and Burgess, 2004; Pérez-Llantada, 2008, forthcoming) -being English the lingua franca of research dissemination in our days. Furthering this line of research on Spanish academics writing up research in English, this paper focuses on the pragmatic phenomenon of negation from a cross-cultural perspective. Negation is an essential rhetorical element in the critical speech acts that scholars perform when contrasting other scholars’ research outcomes with their own research outcomes in the Discussion sections of their research articles. In this paper I take a bottom-up approach for the analysis of the negative words (following the taxonomy proposed by Biber et al, 2007). My aim is to explore whether clause and word negation correlate with critical speech acts such as contrasting previous and present outcomes and indicating limitations of the study, as also suggested by Nwogu (1997) in a corpus of Discussion sections of biomedical research articles written by native English scholars. Overall, the analysis on the use of negative words indicates that whereas the nonnative- English (Spanish) writers put forth critical speech acts in a direct and personal manner both in their L1 and L2 texts, the native-English scholars' way of contrasting previous and present research or indicating limitations can be characterized as more indirect and impersonal. This rhetorical variation may be an indication of the contribution that these eclectic L2 multicultural written productions might have in the continuous transformation and enrichment of English as the lingua franca of academic research and communication.
Keywords: contrastive rhetoric, negation, genre analysis, Discussion sections, English as a lingua franca
Managing Interaction with Readers in English and Spanish Opinion Columns: A Corpus-Based Study
María Pérez Blanco (University of Leon)
The present paper deals with the linguistic expression of writer-reader interactions in English and Spanish opinion columns. Writers of this opinion genre do not simply limit themselves to put forward some ideas in the text, but they also have to acknowledge the presence of their readers, guiding them through their argument, drawing their attention over certain issues and anticipating their possible objections (Hyland 2004). The present study will focus on the different strategies and formal resources columnists use to actualise these functions, their distribution and frequency of use. A contrastive analysis methodology will unveil the main trends and the similarities and differences between both languages. The texts analyzed in this paper have been extracted from a large comparable corpus of English and Spanish opinion columns from the most widely read British and Spanish quality newspapers. The similarities and differences between both languages revealed in this study will be valuable in the field of translation and will supply the raw material for the building up of applications in the field of professional writing for the press (ESP).
Keywords: interaction, engagement, reader, contrastive analysis, opinion columns.
South Park: Yeah, Yeah, We Get the Picture
Antonia Sánchez Macarro and Nicolás Pino James (University of Valencia)
The aim of this paper is to explore the pragmatic power of the words used in the American TV show South Park. We will therefore carry out a pragmatic analysis on a podcast that was broadcast during one of its episodes (You Have 0 Friends). This sample will show how speakers mould language by using pragmatics to communicate their message, resorting to the shared knowledge of the audience and the reliance on the activation of background suppositions and expectations. This podcast achieves its sarcastic effects by the establishment of a mapping of two conceptual domains that generates a rigid metaphor easily inferred by the audience through the flexibility of the human mind in the exploitation and management of concepts.
Keywords: South Park, pragmatics, encyclopedic assumptions, conceptual domains, metaphor.
Text-internal and Text-external Features of Disciplinary Discourses: A Preliminary Corpus-Based Study
Concepción Orna Montesinos (University of Zaragoza)
In this presentation I intend to analyze the text internal features of the discourse of construction engineering focusing on the noun building and its modifiers in a corpus of construction engineering textbooks, the Construction Textbooks Corpus (CTC). At theoretical basis of this work is Bhatia’s (2004, 2008) study of the interrelatedness of text-external and text-internal features in the creation of professional writing. Corpus findings show the complexity of the building noun phrase in which different modifiers and premodifier are used in association with building thus contributing to its lexico-grammatical density as well as increasing its semantic complexity. This informational packaging contributes to the specificity of disciplinary discourse while requiring the expert knowledge of its member to decode its meaning (Halliday & Martin 1993). With the aim of reaching a wider understanding of what the concept ‘building’ means for this disciplinary community, the next step is to move to the discourse semantic analysis of the modifiers used to define, evaluate or identify the building. This preliminary analysis has shown that the meaning of building in the CTC is closely related to the ethos a discipline with a social compromise for sustainability, for the conservation of our architectural heritage as well as for technical innovation and creativity.
Keywords: text-internal and text-external features, lexico-grammar, construction engineering, textbooks.
Socio-Political Digital Storytelling as Critical Device
Carmen Gregori Signes (University of Valencia)
With the advent of the Internet as the main channel of communication and information, storytelling is going through considerable changes and thus giving birth to new modes of telling a story. One such new mode is digital storytelling, which has altered the pragmatic dimensions of storytelling (Rodriguez Ruiz 2007) in particular the relationship that holds between narrator and audience. Robin (2005-2008) classifies the types of digital stories as belonging to one of the following: a) educational; b) historical; c) personal. To this I would add a fourth type which I labelled Socio-political digital storytelling, the object of study in this article. Socio-political storytelling is a new mode of communication, is still an emerging genre, with the potential of becoming a powerful tool that individuals can use in order to bring up and out issues that may concern and affect social stability. This talk article is organised in several parts. I first describe digital storytelling as a multimodal type of discourse that has altered the pragmatic dimensions of telling stories. Secondly, I proceed to define a new emerging type, i.e., socio-political storytelling, the main focus of this article. Thirdly, I present the results of the analysis of the semantic structures/ topics (van Dijk 2001: 101) in a selection of some representative examples of web sites and individual examples of socio-political digital storytelling on the World Wide Web.