English Text Construction - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2009

In this paper I examine the ramifications of doubling and repetition in Nabokov’s Lolita, with reference to Proustian notions of recollection, which are adumbrated in the novel at various occasions, such as Humbert’s claim to have written an academic paper titled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey.” I begin by tracing out the contours of what such an article might have been like and then I apply these points to a reading of Lolita.

Jeanette Winterson’s overlooked revision of the biblical text of the Flood, Boating for Beginners (1985), epitomises postmodern narratives that question patriarchal and capitalist society by means of irony, parody and pastiche. Focusing on the theme of creation and re-creation, this article explores how — through several textual processes — discredit is brought on the biblical text and on the God figure, so as to reaffirm the power of creative writers. Yahweh, a subversive character, is allegedly the Creator, but quickly turns out to be Noah’s Frankenstein-like creation. Noah’s function as God’s maker and writer of Genesis furthermore mirrors the author’s own writing process. By using Feuerbach’s projection theory, I examine how, while the godhead is de-constructed, the status of the author is subversively reasserted.

The present paper aims to complement recent work on deictic movement verb constructions by using a corpus-based approach to identify differences between the four deictic movement verb constructions: go-and-V, come-and-V, go-V and come-V, and to evaluate the proposal made in Nicolle (2007) that go/come-V developed from go/come-and-V in the context of imperative clauses. It will be shown that this is a possible scenario for the development of go-V from go-and-V, although come-V may have developed by analogy with go-V rather than independently from come-and-V. Finally, subjectification will be proposed as a motivating factor in the development of both go-V and come-V.

Most accounts of you know as a discourse marker underline shared knowledge as its core value. This study focuses on less standard values of you know where it functions as an introducer of new viewpoints or pieces of information, as a marker of the speakers’ will to impose their viewpoint, or as an emphasizing marker.
 We show that the loss of the spatio-temporal anchoring of the sequence and the evolution of its prosodic features are characteristics of those particular uses of you know. This leads us to propose a grammaticalization cline with clearcut stages, where the more argumentative uses of you know correspond to the rightmost stage of the cline (Traugott and Dasher 2002).

Portuguese academic discourse of the humanities is notoriously difficult to render into English, given the prevalence of rhetorical and discourse features that are largely alien to English academic style. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that some of those features might find their way into the English texts produced by Portuguese scholars through a process of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfer. If so, this would have important practical and ideological implications, not only for the academics concerned, but also for editors, revisers, teachers of EAP, translators, writers of academic style manuals and all the other gatekeepers of the globalized culture.
 The study involved a corpus of some 113,000 running words of English academic prose written by established Portuguese academics in the Humanities, which had been presented to a native speaker of English (professional translator and specialist in academic discourse) for revision prior to submission for publication. After correction of superficial grammatical and spelling errors, the texts were made into a corpus, which was tagged for Part of Speech (CLAWS7) and discourse markers (USAS) using WMatrix2 (Rayson 2003). The annotated corpus was then interrogated for the presence of certain discourse features using Wmatrix2 and Wordsmith 5 (Scott 1999), and the findings compared with those of a control corpus, Controlit, of published articles written by L1 academics in the same or comparable journals.
 The results reveal significant overuse of certain features by Portuguese academics, and a corresponding underuse of others, suggesting marked differences in the value attributed to those features by the two cultures.

A great number of cross-cultural analyses of academic written genres have shown that there are cultural differences in the use of certain rhetorical and metadiscoursal features in texts produced in English and other languages. Intercultural studies of L2 (English) academic texts are more scarce. They tend to point out that these texts occupy a mid-position between those produced in the two L1s. The present research analyses logical markers in L1 research articles (RAs) in Spanish and English and L2 RAs in English in a specific discipline to try to unveil whether the use made of these metadiscoursal features by Spanish scholars in their English RAs resembles that in L1 English or Spanish texts. The use of additive, contrastive and consecutive logical markers is found to be rather different in the English and Spanish RAs and, in turn, their use in the English RAs written by Spanish scholars resembles that in RAs written by Anglo-American peers. Thus, no transfer process seems to occur from L1 (Spanish) RAs into L2 (English) texts. It is hypothesized that some rhetorical and metadiscoursal features may be more likely than others to undergo this transfer in academic genres, a hypothesis which shall be confirmed by future research. The possible reasons for these results are also discussed as well as their pedagogical implications.

The interactive nature of otherwise largely monologic spoken academic discourse is a feature that has recently attracted some research attention; however, to my knowledge, interactiveness has not been discussed from a processing point of view. In this paper, I argue that the processing side of interactiveness in student presentations should be looked for in presenters’ attempts to use grammatical structure to facilitate their listeners’ processing of dense informational content. The analysis was based on the use of finite adverbial clauses found in L1 and L2 corpora of student presentations. It revealed that presenters’ ordering of adverbial clauses serves both interactional processing and discourse purposes but only their cumulative effect provides a fuller account of students’ ordering preferences in prepared discourse. The findings are discussed in light of the relationship between grammatical weight and informational processing and have implications for L1 and L2 students’ communication training courses.