English Text Construction - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2019

This article explores how the notion of decreation manifests itself in the signifying strategies of Anne Carson’s Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005). By revisiting Carson’s stereoscopic poetics and Wolfgang Iser’s branch of reader-response criticism, the article conceptualises these signification strategies, which include generic hybridity and multimodality, as guiding devices that usher the reader’s perspective towards a stereoscopic vision of sameness-in-otherness. These strategies can evoke a sense of ‘decreation’ by drawing the reader’s attention to the boundary between (apparent) incongruities whilst simultaneously encouraging the reader to forge previously unsuspected connections. The semiological argument proposed here concludes that the transcendence of this ‘edge’ by means of analogical thinking constitutes the metaphysical project of personal re-creation.

This paper investigates the use of aspect and modality in English predicative and specificational copulars. To examine attractions of aspectual and modal meanings to the VPs in the copular constructions, I carry out collostructional analyses (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003). These attractions are interpreted with respect to (i) the lexicogrammatically coded meaning of the copular clauses and (ii) the pragmatic mechanisms that they trigger (e.g. (non-)exhaustiveness implicature), and (iii) the discursive functions they serve in specific contexts of use. It is crucial that this study takes into account specificational copulars with indefinite vs definite variable NPs, which carry an implicature of non-exhaustiveness vs exhaustiveness respectively. I will argue that the felicity of specific aspectual construals is related to the meanings coded at level (i), while the attraction of modal verbs is related to all three levels.

Constructing a coherent text and achieving genre-specific communicative purposes are crucial aspects of academic writing. However, to date, it remains unclear how coherence and genre are related to each other conceptually. This paper seeks to extend previous research on the influence of genre on coherence relations by examining how writers of applied linguistics research articles (RAs) organise sentences in the discussion section to achieve communicative purposes of the RA discussion genre. The analyses suggest that the writers of the selected discussions might have related sentences to each other differently depending on the purposes they sought to achieve. Possible reasons for relational features are considered in light of the nature of the RA discussion genre and/or the applied linguistics discipline.

Many studies have investigated the correlations between linguistic features and human judgements of writing quality. These studies usually investigate either proficient student writing or exceptional literary writing. The current study attempts to bridge these two perspectives by comparing proficient writing to award-winning exceptional writing using movie reviews written by bloggers and Pulitzer Prize winners. A range of linguistic features representing syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, and lexical cohesion were analyzed using both automated and interpretive methods. It is found that some, but not all, of the trends seen in writing development studies continue on to exceptional writing, with lexical sophistication and lexical cohesion through conceptual associations making the largest contributions to the differences between proficient and exceptional writers.

This paper investigates the different readings and meanings of never in the speech of London adults and teenagers, with particular attention to cases in which this negative is equivalent to a sentential negator in the past. The analysis of a sample of over 2,000 tokens extracted from three main corpora serves to provide not only a qualitative perspective on this issue but also a quantitative one that presents new empirical evidence. The universal negative quantificational use of never is seen to be the most frequent while punctual never comes second. The data analysed also indicate that in the last few years there has been an increase in such uses of this negative compared to the early 1990s. However, no notable differences are attested in this respect when contrasting adult and teen speech.