Abstract
Starting from the assumption that local and disciplinary cultures have an impact on the rhetorical organization of the text and on identity construction within a genre, this paper takes a corpus-assisted approach to genre variation across English and Italian research articles in history. Specifically, the main emphasis lies on ‘conclu*’ and its lemmatizations, or, more precisely, on second-level Summarizers and Concluders and with metadiscourse across moves. As will be seen, second-level discourse markers (SLDMs) represent a marked option, in that they add extra meaning to their more general, more transparent, more frequent, and less specific counterparts. Whereas variation within the unit or pattern results from combinations with discourse markers from the same or other categories, variation across English and Italian is better accounted for within an interpersonal model of metadiscourse, in terms of different strategies on the interactional level.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Admittedly, as a reviewer rightly points out, much of the recent impetus has come from research into news discourse and the language of economics in particular. See, among many others, Murphy (2005), for a contrastive study of markers of attribution in English and Italian opinion articles, or Musacchio and Ahmad (2009) and Musacchio (2011), for English and Italian economics metaphors.
- 2.
More particularly, Siepmann (2005: 241–326) provides extensive discussion of the inclusion and treatment of English, French and German second-level discourse markers in the macro- and microstructures of mono- and bilingual dictionaries.
- 3.
To the extent that the analysis we present places the main emphasis on coherence relations and metadiscourse, we use the terms connector (or connective, cf. Bondi 2013) and discourse marker (Siepmann 2005). This enables us to better position ourselves within descriptive approaches to discourse that concentrate on the encoding of structural relationships between segments of text and discourse. For terminological issues, see, among others, Shourop’s (1999) tutorial overview of discourse markers and functionally related expressions, Aijmer and Simon-Vendenbergen’s delimitation of the terms pragmatic markers and discourse markers (2006: 3–4), or Bondi’s (2013) encyclopaedic entry on connectives and cognate terms.
- 4.
One anonymous reviewer recommends substituting evil for bad, probably based on Martin and White (2005). In their Appraisal Framework, adjectives such as ‘bad’, ‘immoral’, ‘evil’ group together in that they convey a judgment of moral sanction and describe the negative dimension of social praise (as expressed by ‘good’, ‘moral’, ‘ethical’). However, we take sides with Thompson and Hunston (2000) and posit a good/bad dimension where ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (though not ‘evil’) respectively express an evaluation of desirability (positive) as opposed to undesirability (negative). This is most often an accidental quality of the entity, which overlays with its basic referential meaning. Following this view, what is useful can be seen as not only important but also desirable and good in terms of goal-achievement (as in 14a, §75 or 14a, §83).
- 5.
For recent developments along similar lines, see Ghezzi (2014). Following Traugott (2003), Ghezzi (2014: 16) defines intersubjectivity as encoding the addresser’s attention towards the addressee’s cognitive stances and social identities. She then categorizes discourse and pragmatic markers into four intersubjective types and functions: responsive, attitudinal, textual interactional, and textual interactive. While clearly intended to address subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the diachronic development of discourse and pragmatic markers, this four-way classification is highly reminiscent of Hyland (2005).
- 6.
Admittedly, based on procedural encoding and encoding of constituents of conceptual representations (Blakemore 2002), work on discourse markers, metadiscourse and evaluation in EAP would benefit enormously from synchronically-oriented reflection on subtle meaning differences across functionally related units. Also, casting first- and second-level discourse markers as metadiscourse in Cognitive Grammar terms (for instance along the lines of Verhagen 2005), we might gain considerable insights into the extent to which individual units broadly serving the same role may differ as to their ability to manage intersubjective coordination relations. This, however, is matter for future research.
- 7.
Scholars specializing in Italian history at non-Italian medium institutions also need to gain full command of the genre features and conventions set by nationally recognized scholars. For reasons of space, however, we restrict discussion to the more frequent case of Italian researchers working in non-English medium institutions.
- 8.
This study can be seen as a contribution to the vast area of studies in the rhetorical organization of the text, but also to the growing literature on local and disciplinary cultures. Having only sought to shed some light into the uses and internal variability of a restricted set of discourse markers, however, it is clear that future descriptive research must consistently take into account the quantitative dimension and concentrate on (dis-)similarities in the lexicalization of coherence relations across English and Italian RAs. This amounts to concentrating on position and frequency of syndetic and asyndetic coordination and subordination within specific moves, as well as variability in the lexicalization of coherence relations, within an interpersonal model of metadiscourse.
References
Ädel, A. (2006). Metadiscourse in L1 and L2 English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Aijmer, K., & Simon-Vendenbergen, A.-M. (Eds.). (2006). Pragmatic markers in contrast. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Battistella, E. L. (1990). Markedness: The evaluative superstructure of language. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Biber, D. (2006). University language. A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Blakemore, D. (2002). Relevance and linguistic meaning: The semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bondi, M. (2013). Connectives. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (2nd ed., pp. 891–897). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bondi, M., & Mazzi, D. (2008). Per concludere veramente: Signalling conclusions in historical research articles in Italian and English. La Torre di Babele. Rivista di letteratura e linguistica, 5, 159–171.
Bondi, M., & Sanz, R. L. (Eds.). (2013). Abstracts in academic discourse. Variation and change. Bern: Peter Lang.
Bruti, S. (1999). In fact and infatti: Same, similar or different? Pragmatics, 9(4), 519–534.
Conrad, S., & Biber, D. (2000). Adverbial marking of stance in speech and writing. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 56–73). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cook, G. (2010). Translation in language teaching. An argument for reassessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Cock, S. (1998). A recurrent word combination approach to the study of formulae in the speech of native and non-native speakers of English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 3, 59–80.
Ellis, R. (2009). Implicit and explicit learning, knowledge and instruction. In R. Ellis, S. Loewen, C. Elder, R. Erlam, J. Philp, & H. Reinders (Eds.), Implicit and explicit knowledge in second language learning, testing and teaching (pp. 3–25). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Fløttum, K., Dahl, T., & Kinn, T. (2006). Academic voices across languages and disciplines. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fraser, B. (1988). Types of English discourse markers. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 38, 19–33.
Ghezzi, C. (2014). The development of discourse and pragmatic markers. In C. Ghezzi & P. Molinelli (Eds.), Discourse and pragmatic markers from Latin to Romance languages (pp. 10–26). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gotti, M. (2008). Investigating specialized discourse (2nd Rev. ed.). Bern: Peter Lang.
Granger, S. (1998). Prefabricated patterns in advanced EFL writing: Collocations and formulae. In A. P. Cowie (Ed.), Phraseology: Theory, analysis and applications (pp. 145–160). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Granger, S., & Paquot, M. (2008). Disentangling the phraseological web. In S. Granger & F. Meunier (Eds.), Phraseology. An interdisciplinary perspective (pp. 27–50). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Greenberg, J. (1966). Language universals. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
Howarth, P. A. (1996). Phraseology in English academic writing. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag.
Hunston, S. (2010). Corpus approaches to evaluation. Phraseology and evaluative language. New York: Routledge.
Hyland, K. (2005). Metadiscourse. Exploring interaction in writing. London: Continuum.
Hyland, K. (2008). As can be seen. Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for Specific Purposes, 27, 4–21.
Hyland, K. (2013). Writing in the university: Education, knowledge and reputation. Language Teaching, 46(1), 53–70.
Hyland, K., & Bondi, M. (Eds.). (2006). Academic discourse across disciplines. Bern: Peter Lang.
Jakobson, R. (1936/1971). Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre: Gesamtbedeutungen der russischen Kasus. In Roman Jakobson. Selected writings 1, 23–71. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kaufmann, M. (2012). Interpreting imperatives. Dordrecht: Springer.
Knott, A., & Dale, R. (1994). Using linguistic phenomena to motivate a set of coherence relations. Discourse Processes, 18(1), 35–62.
Knott, A., & Sanders, T. (1998). The classification of coherence relations and their linguistic markers: An exploration of two languages. Journal of Pragmatics, 30, 135–175.
König, E. (1991). The meaning of focus particles: A comparative perspective. London: Routledge.
Vande Kopple, W. J. (1985). Some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse. College Composition and Communication, 36(1), 82–93.
López-Arroyo, B. (2004). English and Spanish medical research papers and abstracts: How differently are they structured? In J. M. Bravo (Ed.), A new spectrum of translation studies (pp. 175–193). Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid.
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maiden, M., & Robustelli, C. (2000). A reference grammar of Modern Italian. London: Arnold.
Mann, W. C. (1999). Introduction to rhetorical structure theory. http://www.sil.org/linguistics/RST/rintro99.htm. Retrieved 1 June 2013.
Mann, W. C., & Thompson, S. A. (1988). Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3), 243–281.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation. Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Merlini Barbaresi, L. (1997). Modification of speech acts. Aggravation and mitigation. In Proceedings of the 16th international congress of linguistics (Paper No 0353). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Murphy, A. (2005). Markers of attribution in English and Italian opinion articles: A comparative corpus-based study. ICAME, 29, 131–150.
Musacchio, T. (2011). Metaphors and metaphor-like processes across languages: Notes on English and Italian language of economics. In K. Ahmad (Ed.), Affective computing and sentiment analysis. Metaphor, ontology and terminology (pp. 89–98). Berlin: Springer.
Musacchio, T., & Ahmad, K. (2009). Variation and variability of economics metaphors in an English-Italian corpus of reports, newspaper and magazine articles. In A. Wallington, J. Barnden, M. Lee, R. Moon, G. Phillip, & J. Littlemore (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to figurative language (Cognitive science research papers, pp. 115–122). Birmingham: University of Birmingham.
Palumbo, G., & Musacchio, M. T. (2010). When a clue is not a clue. A corpus-driven study of explicit vs. implicit signalling of sentence links in popular economics translation. Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione, 12, 63–76.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English syntax. London: Longman.
Sabatini, F., & Coletti, V. (2007). Il Sabatini Coletti. Dizionario della lingua italiana 2008. Milano: Rizzoli Larousse.
Scott, M. (2012). WordSmith Tools 6.0. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Searle, J. R., & Vandervecken, D. (1985). Foundations of illocutionary logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shourop, L. (1999). Discourse markers. Lingua, 107, 227–265.
Siepmann, D. (2005). Discourse markers across languages. London: Routledge.
Sinclair, J. M. (1991). Corpus concordance collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, J. M. (1993). Written discourse structure. In J. M. Sinclair, M. Hoey, & G. Fox (Eds.), Techniques of description: Spoken and written discourse. A Festschrift for Malcolm Coulthard (pp. 6–31). London: Routledge.
Smith, C. S. (2003). Modes of discourse. The local structure of texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Svalberg, A. M.-L. (2007). Language awareness and language learning. Language Teaching, 40(4), 287–308.
Svalberg, A. M.-L. (2009). Engagement with language. Developing a construct. Language Awareness, 18(3–4), 242–258.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis. English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres. Explorations and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1–27). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Traugott, E.-C. (2003). From subjectification to intersubjectification. In R. Hickey (Ed.), Motives for language change (pp. 624–647). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1939). Grundzüge der Phonologie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. English edition: Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1969). Principles of phonology (C. A. M. Baltaxe, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ur, P. (2012). A course in English language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Verhagen, A. (2005). Constructions of intersubjectivity. Discourse, syntax and cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Waugh, L. R., & Lafford, B. A. (1994). Markedness. In R. E. Asher & J. M. Y. Simpson (Eds.), The encyclopaedia of language and linguistics 5 (pp. 2378–2383). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cacchiani, S. (2015). On Concluders and Other Discourse Markers in the Concluding Moves of English and Italian Historical Research Articles. In: Romero-Trillo, J. (eds) Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2015. Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17948-3_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17948-3_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17947-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17948-3
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)