Discourse markers, as words or phrases, play a significant role in promoting coherent segments of discourse. This paper investigates the use of discourse markers (DMs) in newspaper articles. By applying Fraser's framework, this study aims at investigating the functions and positions of DM "but" (English) and its equivalent…

It is widely believed that tourist trade has been the fastest developing trade in the world. In China, with the development of economy and the improvement of people's living standard, travelling has been an indispensable part of living. Therefore, tourism text becomes one of the most effective publicity tool to attractive tourists. A tour guide…

The study of teaching translation has always been influenced by the theory of foreign language teaching, regardless of the theoretical or practical approaches the researchers used. In the classroom, students are frequently bored with translating grammar because they are seldom taught how grammar works. In view of this teaching gap, this study…

This dissertation examines how the Japanese particles "nado", "toka", and "tari" which all may be translated as "such as", "etc.", or "like" behave differently in written and spoken discourse. According to traditional analyses (e.g. Martin, 1987), these particles are assumed to be Exemplifying Particles (EP) used to provide concrete examples to…

Discusses the relationship between translation and discourse analysis or text linguistics theory. (AM)

Open-system words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) can function as exponents of a clause relation and be predictive of the organization of written discourse while closed-system words (a, the, and, because, etc.) cannot. Supporting criteria are presented. (DAG)

Reviews research that points toward the theoretical consideration of conventionalized written language, proposing that written discourse conventions can usefully be studied from a multifunctional perspective considering the interacting social, cognitive, and textual functions of language. A large unannotated bibliography is included. (CB)

Reviews corpus-based research that draws on theoretical insights from systemics, genre, and discourse analysis for exploration of small-scale specialized corpora of academic writing. (Author/VWL)

Study of the pragmatics of politeness conventionally draws on conversational data, but can be extended to some genres of written text. A framework is described that analyzes politeness strategies in terms of impositions (claims and denials of claims) and reveals some stylistic features in scientific papers and in popularizations. (Author/CB)

Identifies variables from speech act theory and conversation analysis that might be applied to the study of business communication. Also examines several business letters to see how principles derived from linguistic studies of politeness apply to business communication research. (AEW)

Approaches used by linguists to examine the way in which speakers or writers modify their commitment to the propositional content of their utterances are discussed, and it is noted that a frequent criticism is the failure of inexperienced speakers or writers to modulate their utterances properly. This paper considers economic reports and in…

Explores whether children acquire semantic structures from early book reading experiences by examining similarities between discourse structures of stories read to and written by two small children. The generative relationship of prototypic and derived stories is demonstrated by the high correspondence between both constituent structure and…

In discourse analysis, connectives have been widely suggested as linguistic markers to indicate the logical linkage between utterances. However, the understanding of the interactions among various kinds of connectives in discourse has been limited. A method of quantifying the overall correlation between different kinds of connectives occurring on…

This paper presents the theory of prototype semantics as a useful approach to understanding the relationship between language and culture in second-language texts as it relates word-meaning to social and cultural models. Second-language writing in English may use the same linguistic structures as first-language texts, but the significance of…

Argues that there are very good reasons for developing discourse grammars for second-language (L2) teaching. Exemplifies the criteria for moving from sentence-based grammar to the discourse level. The criteria are based on pedagogical and descriptive problems in grammar that sentence-based approaches cannot adequately deal with. (Author/VWL)