Anna Mauranen

Contrastive ESP rhetoric: Metatext in Finnish-English economics texts

Abstract This article describes a contrastive textlinguistic study of rhetorical differences between texts written by academics with different cultural backgrounds. It is assumed that, despite a relative uniformity of academic papers imposed by requirements of the genre, there is significant intercultural variation in the rhetorical preferences of writers. The cultural differences between texts written by Finnish and Anglo-American academics are explored with respect to metatext use in papers from economics journals. The results indicate that Anglo-American writers use more metatext or text about text than Finnish writers. It seems that Anglo-American writers are more concerned with guiding and orienting the reader than Finns, and show more explicit presence of the writer in the text. This is taken to reflect a more reader-oriented attitude, a more positive notion of politeness, and a generally more explicit textual rhetoric. Finnish writers show a more negative kind of politeness and a greater tendency towards implicitness in their writing. Such differences may result in unintentionally inefficient rhetoric when the target audience does not share the writers assumptions and attitudes.

Linguistic Analysis of Grant Proposals: European Union Research Grants

Abstract Grant proposals are a genre that all academics will have to come to terms with at some point of their career, usually the sooner the better. Yet, there has been very little research on their characteristic features and they are not included in most courses of academic writing. We seek to remedy some of this problem in this paper, which is based on a sample of 34 proposals from European Union (EU) research grant applications written mainly by Finnish-led research teams. Our approach draws on Swalesian genre analysis as well as a social constructionist theory of genre [ Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995 ]. In our analysis, we identified ten recurrent moves in the proposals, reflecting the generic affinity of grant proposals to both academic research papers ( Swales 1981 and Swales 1990 ) and promotional genres ( Bhatia 1993 ), in addition to moves specific to the grant proposals genre. The results should benefit both genre research and the teaching of academic writing.

The Corpus of English as Lingua Franca in Academic Settings

political power of the United States, but the origins have ceased to be the prime motivation for the continued spread of the language. Most of its use today is by nonnative speakers (NNSs), and the number of people speaking it as a foreign or second language has surpassed the number of its native speakers (NSs) (about 80% of speakers of English are estimated to be bilingual users; see Crystal, 1997). As a consequence, voices in the English teaching profession and among scholars in the field (see, e.g., Kachru, 1996; Knapp, 2002; McArthur, 2001; Rampton, 1990; Seidlhofer, 2000; Widdowson, 1994) have questioned the NSs status as the most relevant model for teaching English and have called for the development of models for international speakers that are more appropriate to the changed role of English. In view of the growing recognition of the widespread use of English, it is surprising that English as a lingua franca (ELF) has been little described as a language form. Native or established world varieties of English (corresponding to the inner and outer circles of Kachru, 1985, but excluding the expanding circle) have attracted scholarly attention

Signaling and preventing misunderstanding in English as lingua franca communication

Abstract The default assumption in human communication is mutual intelligibility between interlocutors. Nevertheless, misunderstandings also occur, and languages have resources for managing these in communicative interaction. When speakers do not share a native language, misunderstandings are generally expected to arise more frequently than between native speakers of the same language. However, it is not clear that communication breakdown is more common among second language users; the anticipation of communicative difficulty may in itself offset much of the trouble, and speakers resort to proactive strategies. This paper investigates misunderstanding and its prevention among participants in university degree programs where English was used as a lingua franca. The findings suggest that speakers engage in various clarification and repair strategies in an apparent attempt to ensure the achievement of mutual intelligibility and thereby the achievement of important communicative goals.

Linear unit grammar :integrating speech and writing

People have a natural propensity to understand language text as a succession of smallish chunks, whether they are reading, writing, speaking or listening. Linguists have found that this propensity can shed light on the nature and structure of language, and there are many studies which attempt to harness the potential of natural chunking.This book explores the role of chunking in the description of discourse, especially spoken discourse. It appears that chunking offers a sound but flexible platform on which can be built a descriptive model which is more open and comprehensive than more familiar approaches to structural description. The model remains linear, in that it avoids hierarchies, and it concentrates on the combinatorial patterns of text. The linear approach turns out to have many advantages, bringing together under one descriptive method a wide variety of different styles of speech and writing. It is complementary to established grammars, but it raises pertinent questions about many of their assumptions.

“It’s just real messy”: the occurrence and function of just in a corpus of academic speech

Abstract This study investigates the roles of just, a lexical item that is among the most frequent in distinguishing academic speech data from roughly comparable written data, in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Concordance analysis showed that just frequently co-occurs with metadiscourse and hedging; a closer functional analysis in selected speech events showed that these collocations were often used with a mitigating function. Minimizers, including limiters as well as mitigators, together made up the overwhelming majority of tokens, while the more frequently taught “temporal” function was much less common, especially in the more formal speech events. Analysis of the phonetic forms of the various functions of just suggest that the mitigating use involves a very reduced token, whereas other functions such as that paraphrasable by “exactly” are more likely to use a full vowel and to be stressed. This suggests that materials for teaching non-native speakers academic English would benefit from greater attention to issues of phonetic detail, as an inappropriately stressed mitigating just may be misinterpreted by native listeners.

Chunking in ELF: Expressions for managing interaction

Abstract This paper adopts a linear perspective on analyzing language, based on Sinclair and Mauranens Linear Unit Grammar (John Benjamins, 2006), and complemented with insights on recurrent patterning discernible in corpus data. The focus is on elements of managing interaction and the way ELF speakers utilize them in co-constructing successful discourse. Interactive phraseological patterns range from very short and fixed expressions up to variable units of around five words; the longer and more variable patterns are more susceptible to unconventional forms. ELF speech manifests approximations of conventional forms. These tend to be close enough to the target to ensure comprehensibility, but at the same time they deviate from conventions with a measure of regularity which suggests emergent patterning rather than random errors.

Spoken Discourse, Academics and Global English: a Corpus Perspective

Analyzing spoken language as it occurs in natural interaction provides radically new insights into language: in the last few decades, research traditions that have focused on speaking (notably discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and pragmatics) have revitalized linguistics and challenged the adequacy of sentence-based models which have developed from analyzing written language — or invented sentences. The tra-ditional concept of clause may go far (even if not all the way) in describing written text, but as anyone working with speech notices, its usefulness as an analytical tool of speaking is limited.

On the relationship between the cognitive and the communal: a complex systems perspective

This paper presents a specific take on the relationship between the global and the local in language. In particular, it draws a distinction between the cognitive and the communal plane of language representation and attempts to model the relationship between the two using complexity theory. To operationalise this relationship and examine it with corpus linguistic methods, it proposes a concept of a cognitive corpus, setting it against the more usual idea of a corpus as representing the language of a certain community of speakers. As a case study, the paper compares the properties of chunking at the cognitive and communal planes. The study shows that (1) chunks at the cognitive plane seem to be more fixed than at the communal, (2) their patterning at the communal plane can be seen as emergent from the patterning observable in individual languages, but that (3) there is also similarity in the shape of the patterning across the two planes. These findings suggest that although the processes leading to multi-word unit patterning are different at each of the planes, the similarity in the shape the patterning takes might be regarded as an indication of the fractal structure of language which is a common property of complex adaptive systems. For example, Zipf’s law, which is able to model the patterning at each of the planes, can be seen as one of the symptoms of such structure. Since the cognitive and the communal planes of language are in constant interaction with each other, such conceptualisation suggests intriguing implications for ongoing change in English and the role second language users might play in it. [A fractal is] a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole. Mandelbrot 1982: 34