Recent years have seen an interest in the generic structure of empirical research articles across a variety of disciplines. However, significantly less attention has been given to theoretical articles. This study aims to begin to address this imbalance by presenting the results of an investigation into the organizational and rhetorical structure…

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical markers of important lecture points and proposes a classification in terms of their interactive and textual orientation. The importance markers were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English corpus using corpus-driven and corpus-based methods. The classification is based on…

Research on the linguistic characteristics of university classroom discourse highlights the salience, in this register, of non-informational and subjective aspects of discourse. This dimension of classroom discourse, however, has not been studied systematically. Taking a corpus-based approach, this study investigates the non-informational…

This article explores the feelings of imposture that are sometimes experienced by multilingual subjects--learners of a language other than their own or users of multiple languages--and their difficulty of finding authentic or legitimate subject positions in a global world with fluid boundaries and uncertain categories of identity. It examines what…

John McHardy Sinclair has made major contributions to applied linguistics in three related areas: language in education, discourse analysis, and corpus-assisted lexicography. This article discusses the far-reaching implications for language description of this third area. The corpus-assisted search methodology provides empirical evidence for an…

Alderson's (2007) paper investigated whether subjective frequency counts for words might be a reliable substitute for corpus data. Alderson is critical of previous research which has found high correlations between corpus data and subjective estimates, and he argues that his own research, "has failed to show that frequency judgements can…

This paper draws on complexity theory and post-modern sociolinguistics to explore how an ecological approach to language data can illuminate aspects of language use in multilingual environments. We first examine transcripts of exchanges taking place among multilingual individuals in multicultural settings. We briefly review what conversation and…

This paper starts by examining recent work by applied linguists who argue that creativity is not only a property of especially skilled and gifted language users, but is pervasive in routine everyday practice. Also variously addressing literariness, language play and humour, this apparent democratization of creativity contributes to a more general…

This article discusses content schemata, formal schemata, and the newly-hypothesized abstract discourse schemata, asserting that empirical studies confirm that abstract schemata are more powerful owing to their greater generality than formal schemata, which in turn are superior to content schemata. (118 references) (MDM)

This study examines casual interactions between first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of Japanese, paying special attention to the coordination of vocal and non-vocal resources that are brought to bear on the achievement of intersubjectivity. More specifically, this study investigates a practice of "embodied completion" (Olsher…

Examines the different meanings of the term discourse, comparing the common use of discourse analysis in applied linguistics with its use both in critical discourse analysis and in a Foucauldian use of the term. An attempt is made to show how these different approaches imply profoundly different understandings of the relationship between language,…

John Swales's 1986 article "Citation analysis and discourse analysis" was written by a discourse analyst to introduce citation research from other fields, mainly sociology of science, to his own discipline. Here, I introduce applied linguists and discourse analysts to citation studies from information science, a complementary tradition not…

We show how emergence offers new explanations for the behaviour of metaphorically-used expressions. Analysis of metaphors in two types of natural language data are combined: detailed analysis of continuous discourse, which offers wealth of context and the possibility of monitoring emergent forms as the discourse unfolds, and computer-assisted…

Discusses prominent base units of discourse analysis designed for dealing with structural characteristics of second-language discourse, and offers arguments in favor of selecting the utterance as a valuable base unit. (95 references) (GLR)

Reports on one important component of language by means of which scientific Research Article (RA) writers structure textual interaction with the external community, namely choices of unmarked theme, i.e., grammatical subject. A functional analysis is presented that reveals how the changing discourse roles of subjects throughout scientific RAs…