Using the academic writing sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus as data and building on previous research, this study strives to identify the most frequently-used multi-word constructions (MWCs) of various types (e.g., idioms, lexical bundles, and phrasal/prepositional verbs) in general…

The purpose of the present study is to shed some light on the subtle interplay between oral and written academic genres in the context of graduate student academic presentations. The analysis was based on a corpus of successful TESOL graduate student academic presentations (n = 20) with a focus on the genre identity roles students encode in their…

This paper presents an analysis of the introductory sections of a corpus of 20 doctoral theses on computing written in Spanish and in English. Our aim was to ascertain whether the theses, produced within the same scientific-technological area but by authors from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, employed the same rhetorical strategies…

This paper reports the findings of a study aiming to reveal the recurring patterns of lexical, syntactic and textual errors in student translations of a specialized EU genre from English into Hungarian. By comparing the student translations to the official translation of the text, this article uncovers the most frequent errors that students made…

This paper seeks to analyse discourse patterns of legal opinions in two languages and cultures--namely, Legal Problem Question Answers (LPQs) in the UK academic writing context and Pareri (Ps) in the Italian professional writing context. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of discourse in this paper, based on the tenets of genre analysis,…

This article examines the role of written and spoken English vis-a-vis written Chinese, Cantonese and Putonghua in the four key service industries that have driven Hong Kong's economy in the past decade. The study forms part of a long-standing and continuing investigation into the impact of Hong Kong's transition from British colony to Chinese…

This article investigates lexical gender in specialized communication. The key method of analysis is that of forms of address, professional titles, and "generic man" in a 10 million word corpus of written Business English. After a brief introduction and literature review on both gender in specialized communication and similar corpus-based views of…

This paper focuses on textual issues in the reporting of action research. There exists a large body of text-analytical work on research reports from various fields, examining for example the organisation and rhetorical purpose of research articles or sections thereof. However, less has been done on the specific issues of reporting action research,…

Journal editorials allow readers to select the most deserving contributions in the literature and adopt approaches or procedures endorsed by an authority in the field; they act as gatekeepers to the community of practice and at the same time allow editors to connect directly with their readership. Following a number of studies on the structure and…

Investigates whether the spoken nature of electronic mail messages has already started to affect business written communication. Examines register and context of the language as well as the style used in commercial electronic mail. (Author/VWL)

Lexical bundles--recurrent sequences of words--are important building blocks of discourse in spoken and written registers. Previous research has shown that lexical bundles are especially prevalent in university classroom teaching, where they serve three major discourse functions: stance expressions, discourse organizers, and referential…

Discusses problems arising in academic writing when name changes occur, making it difficult to keep up with a person's work over time and to know that the same person was involved in two publications with names that look different. Argues that these naming practices and others must be considered in preparing students from cultures with different…

Investigated the extent to which there is rhetorical variation between the research article abstracts written in English for international journals and those written in Spanish and published in Spanish journals in the area of experimental social sciences. Rhetorical variables found across the two languages may be explained by the different…

Examines introductory genres and their various realizations, conventionally used to introduce academic books and variously named as "introduction,""preface,""acknowledgement," and "publishers blurb" to investigate their nature, function, and structure within the context of current theory in genre analysis…

Using a discourse interview method, the way that professionals read resumes was investigated. Results showed that professional readers shared a special inferential reading of resumes; however they did not share the kind of consistent reading that might result in a formula of how to write resumes. Shortcomings of popular prescriptions for writing…