- Home
- e-Journals
- English Text Construction
- Previous Issues
- Volume 14, Issue 2, 2021
English Text Construction - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2021
Volume 14, Issue 2, 2021
-
The representation of mothers and the gendered social structure of nineteenth-century children’s literature
Author(s): Anna Čermáková and Michaela Mahlbergpp.: 119–149 (31)More LessAbstractLanguage has the capacity to create fictional worlds and to describe real-life social structures. In this paper, we explore gendered social structures in a corpus of nineteenth-century children’s fiction. We describe these structures in terms of the frequent nouns that are used to label people in the texts of the corpus. Through a bottom-up categorisation of these nouns into four groups, we find, in line with previous studies, textual evidence of a society that is unequal and that is divided into a private and a public sphere. Our study focuses in particular on mothers, the most frequent character type in children’s fiction. The representation of mothers includes abstract qualities, such as a mother’s love, as well as concrete behaviours, such as mothers taking their children into their arms. Both types of qualities contribute to the depiction of mothers as an anchor point for the private sphere.
-
Quality TV and cultural origin
Author(s): Sergio Abellán, Daniel Candel Bormann, Francisco Sáez de Adana and Alejandro Garcíapp.: 150–181 (32)More LessAbstractQuality TV is a multi-layered phenomenon that often expresses itself through its formal qualities. This article asks to what extent form also depends on cultural origin. It compares the Spanish historical series Isabel (RTVE) and the Anglo-American The Crown (Netflix) by subjecting their narrative and medium-specific styles to a mixed method analysis. Despite similar authorial intentions, Isabel invests in action and dialogue and The Crown in cinematic style; furthermore, Isabel’s teleological and political narrative contrasts with The Crown’s fragmented, more private narrative. While both series ingeniously adapt their telling to their historical periods, the Spanish understanding of history as a feat of memorization simplifies the narrative to thicken factual density, whereas the more metacognitive Anglo-American approach to history ensures a multi-level reading of the account, which is more in line with quality TV.
-
Non-coherent cohesive texts
Author(s): Emad A. S. Abu-Ayyashpp.: 182–202 (21)More LessAbstractThis article examines the function of cohesive devices (i.e., the linguistic tools that are usually used to link the various parts of the text) in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In Lucky’s soliloquy, certain cohesive devices are employed intensively so as to impede immediate understanding. At the same time, Beckett’s distinctive use of cohesive devices uniquely establishes a more profound awareness of the work’s message, which this article identifies as strategic coherence. This paper employed an embedded (QUAL:quan) mixed-methods approach and a validated model of cohesion to analyse Lucky’s speech.
-
Attribution in novice academic writing
Author(s): Hilde Hasselgårdpp.: 203–230 (28)More LessAbstractAcademic attribution, the direct acknowledgement of external sources, is investigated in two corpora of novice academic English, representing first and second language writing in linguistics. The forms and uses of attribution are analysed in a formal-functional framework. There is an overall underrepresentation of attribution in the learner corpus. However, the corpora have a similar proportional distribution of integral and non-integral attribution, but a difference in subtypes of these. Undated attributions are discussed as a special case. They occur in specific contexts, of which reference to course reading is peculiar to novice writing. Comparisons with expert corpora in Norwegian and English indicate that some, but not all, of the differences between the novice corpora may be linked to influence from the learners’ first language and culture.
-
Stance and engagement in selected Nigerian Supreme Court judgments
Author(s): Florence Oluwaseyi Daniel and Foluke Olayinka Unuabonahpp.: 231–252 (22)More LessAbstractThe study investigates stance and engagement strategies of Nigerian Supreme Court judges in constructing arguments in their opinions. Fifty purposively selected judicial opinions were quantitatively and qualitatively analysed using Hyland’s stance and engagement model. The findings reveal that Nigerian Supreme Court judges used more stance than engagement features. Among the stance features found, the judges used more self-mention devices to establish authorial presence and distinguish their views from others. Prevalent among engagement markers, on the other hand, are directives, informed by the normative nature of the text and the judges’ keenness to owning such prescribed norms.
Most Read This Month

-
-
Notions of (inter)subjectivity
Author(s): Jan Nuyts
-
-
-
A case for corpus stylistics
Author(s): Michaela Mahlberg and Dan McIntyre
-
- More Less