English Text Construction - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2022

This paper offers a detailed study of Theme as point of departure in English and Spanish academic texts. A corpus of around 45,000 words is examined from different perspectives to compare the realizations, functions and interplays of the point of departure in these two languages. Examples reveal crosslinguistic contrasts in terms of (a) the preferred realizations of thematic elements, (b) the strategies to maintain participant identity and present new participants and (c) the resources used to construe texture. We will see that whereas English favours thematic non-pronominal noun groups, Spanish combines these with other realizations. Additionally, the different syntactic characteristics of each language have a reflection on different ways of signalling semantic continuity and on textual development in general. The findings presented in this paper should make a significant contribution to the existing literature on Theme, as well as on academic writing and contrastive typological research.

Direct quotation (DQ) use varies considerably across disciplines, from complete absence in hard sciences to relative frequency in social sciences. This study investigates DQs in literature, focusing on PhD thesis introductions in English. A corpus of 15 introductions tagged for move-and-step genre analysis was used to investigate DQ frequency, their distribution in the rhetorical structure of introductions, and source text types used for DQs. The findings show that (i) DQs are the most common source use practice in the corpus; (ii) DQs are concentrated in three rhetorical steps: reviewing previous research, presenting the analysed literary work, and making topic generalisations; and (iii) source text type used for DQs is associated with specific rhetorical steps. These findings suggest that DQs are essential for the realisation of the rhetorical purpose of the steps which carry them and for knowledge construction in literature PhD theses.

Due to prevalence of formal analysis in language education, the implications of Systemic Functional Grammar has largely been ignored by materials and methods of language education. To illustrate the inadequacies of formal analysis and make a case for functional analysis and assessment of writing samples, this study aims at exploring the use of modality in a random sample of expository essays written in an EFL context. To this end, 20 expository essays, written by undergraduate students of English language and literature, were randomly obtained from writing instructors and professors teaching in the English department of Shahrood University of Technology (SUT), Iran. Leaners’ use of modality was then analyzed in line with the framework presented by Halliday & Matthiessen (2014). Analysis revealed learners’ lack of variation in the expression of uncertainties and doubts and as such lack of mastery over modality since they tended to express their opinions as implicit and as objective as possible. There seems to be a link between this problem and the dominance of formal analysis in teaching and assessing writing; hence, the findings of this study have clear implications for teaching instruction in this context and other similar contexts, where the implications of systemic functional grammar for language education seem to be ignored.

This article investigates the extent to which TED talks can be considered a narrative register. This study analyses ‘narrative versus non-narrative discourse’ (Biber 1988) in a corpus of TED talks (n = 2483). TED talks were found to be typically non-narrative (−2.47 mean). However, there was a great degree of variation, with approximately 10% of talks (n = 257) classified as narrative. When TED talks were compared to registers in prior studies they were close to academic prose and presented a similar pattern in terms of disciplinary variation, with ‘soft’ disciplines closer to narratives. When textual data was examined, the average TED talk was found to weave narrative and descriptive elements, but were found to be more descriptive overall.