English Text Construction - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2015

The present article aims to provide a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day that focuses on the author’s ‘gentle transgression’ of three local myths become international commodities: the myths of the English butler, the English country house and Englishness itself. It also examines how, in the process, the butler’s identity becomes an increasingly heterogeneous one, a “transindividuality” (Bessière 2010) potentially representative of a sedentary or “rooted” (Appiah 1997) form of critical cosmopolitanism. Ishiguro thus responds to the challenges of globalization, suggesting that a constantly questioned to-and-fro movement between the local and the global, each in turn enriching the other, might prevent the much-feared homogenization of cultures.

This paper investigates sequences featuring a coreferential link between a left-detached constituent and a resumptive in the following main clause [‘LDet-sequences’]. Their syntactic, semantic and textual behaviour is investigated in historically recent texts (since Modern English) where such detachments are not generally expected to replicate the behaviour that has been attested for contemporary spoken English Left Dislocation [‘LDis’] (cf. Geluykens 1993; Gregory & Michaelis 2001; Snider 2005; Netz et al. 2011). A typology of LDet-sequences is proposed in order to investigate them beyond their apparent structural similarities with spoken English LDis. Left-detached referents are found to typically hold a weak relationship with clause-grammar; however, some of the LDet-sequences attested also exhibit a certain degree of deviation from the less syntactic and freer, discoursal behaviour that characterises others. As far as their diachronic development is concerned, only LDet-sequences that closely resemble LDis illustrate the declining course reported in previous research for LDis (cf. Pérez-Guerra & Tizón-Couto 2009). Lastly, LDet-sequences are more frequent in drama and fiction; thus, the prediction that they are employed to recreate conversation (cf. Geluykens 1992) is provisionally borne out.

Situated within a Systemic Functional Linguistics genre paradigm, this study adopted a function-based linguistic approach to examine the argument structures in English writing produced by Chinese university students of English as foreign language (EFL). Their English writing was contrasted with three other sets of argumentative essays in order to explore differences and similarities in the use of argument structures. The four sets of essays were produced by three groups of university students: native English- and Chinese-speaking university students and Chinese university EFL students. Participants’ interviews and questionnaire responses were also collected. The study found that most native English-speaking participants used an analytical arguing strategy, while most Chinese-speaking university participants preferred a hortatory argument structure both in their English and Chinese writing. It was also found that Chinese participants’ English writing was influenced by both English and Chinese.

Drawing upon the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper compares the word order patterns of English and French adverbial connectors of contrast in a comparable bilingual corpus of quality newspaper editorials. The study shows that the two languages offer the same possibilities in terms of connector positioning but differ markedly in the preferred patterns that they display. In both languages, connector placement proves to be influenced by three main types of factors: language-specific syntactic, rhetorical and lexical factors. The notion of Rheme, which tends to be under-researched in the literature in comparison to that of Theme, plays a key role in the analysis.