Lecture Notes Flashcards

Flashcards for reviewing lecture notes on text linguistics, discourse analysis and academic writing.

Multimodal Text

May include written, spoken, or a combination of both, extending beyond linguistic semiotics to incorporate other meaning-making modalities; may not always include language.

Text (in Linguistics)

Any passage, spoken or written, of any length, that forms a unified whole.

Functional Language

Language that is doing a job in some context, playing a part in a context of situation.

Informative Function

Represents objects and facts.

Expressive Function

Expresses inner states and emotions of a text's addresser.

Appellative Function

Makes an appeal to a text's addressee, persuading them to act or raising awareness about a problem.

Informative Text Type

Text type with the main function to inform.

Expressive Text Type

Text type with the main function to express.

Operative Text Type

Text type with the main function to appeal/persuade.

Texture

The property that distinguishes text from non-text; holds the clauses of a text together to give them unity; involves coherence and cohesion.

Coherence

How a group of clauses or sentences relate to the context.

Cohesion

How elements within a text bind it together (e.g., reference, lexical cohesion, conjunctive cohesion).

Genre

A class of communicative events sharing communicative purposes, recognized by members of a discourse community; exhibits patterns in schematic structure, style, content, and intended audience.

Discourse Community

A group of people with expertise in a field, sharing common public goals, specific lexis, genres, and mechanisms of intercommunication.

Functional Unit

A text's part (phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, images, etc.) performing a communicative function toward achieving the overall purpose of the text.

PSA Genre (Pubblicità Progresso)

Genre with Communicative function of raising awareness of and getting someone taking action on a controversial topic.

Formal Language

Language usage that is determined by specific situtations.

Context of Culture

Social, cultural, political, historical, or legal conditions in which people operate (extra-linguistic level).

Context of Situation

Situational environment in which people operate (extra-linguistic level).

Lexicogrammar

Choices of lexis, grammar, and syntax made by people (linguistic level).

Field

Refers to what is going on; the nature of the ongoing social activity of the communicative event.

Tenor

Who is taking part in the situation; the interactive participants.

Mode

How meanings are being exchanged; the nature of communication.

Interactive Participants

The participants in the act of communication - the participants who speak and listen or write and read.

Represented Participants

The participants who constitute the subject matter of the communication, that is the people, the place and things represented in and by the speech or writing.

Social Role

The position one holds in a society or group.

Social Distance

Is concerned with the degree of connection or closeness between the interactive participants.

Spontaneity

Concerned with whether the text was produced 'on-the-spot' or not.

English for Academic Purposes (EAP)

The English needed by those who use the English language to perform academic tasks.

Academic Writing

The formal writing style used in universities and scholarly publications (e.g. research papers, abstracts, essays, dissertations, textbooks, etc.).

Academic Discourse

The ways of thinking and using language which exist in the academy.

IMRAD

Stands for Introduction, Materials, Results, And Dend. Structure of research articles.

CARS model

Model of introduction to research articles.

It-Constructions

Impersonal structures e.g. It is difficult to foresee a significant improvement in the levels of poverty in Liberia while the fighting continues. (cf. I cannot foresee…)

Existential There

Impersonal structures e.g. There was no evidence of any weight loss as reported for other marking methods, and most of the tattooed animals did not show any behaviours indicating irritation after being marked. (cf. I found no evidence…)

Passive Voice

In passive constructions, the clause begins with the person or thing being acted on or affected by the action (the person or thing being acted on or affected by the action is the topic/theme of the clause).

Short Passive

Reduces the importance of the agent NP by not mentioning it at all

Clause

Grammatical unit consisting of one or more phrases

Phrase

Grammatical unit consisting of one or more words

Noun Phrase (NP)

A grammatical unit built from words, consisting of a noun or a pronoun as head.

Nominal Adjectivation

Use of a noun to specify another with an adjectival function

Discourse Markers

Words and expressions which help structure spoken exchanges and written texts (e.g. furthermore, therefore, in conclusion, etc.)

Collocations

Words which frequently appear together e.g. RESEARCH

Formulaic Expressions

Fixed or frequently occurring combinations of (three or more) words e.g. on the other hand, due to the fact that, on the basis of the

Swales’ definition of Discourse Community

A group of people who have goals and purposes and use communication to achieve their goals.

Language for Special Purposes (LSPs)

Languages used to discuss specialized fields of knowledge (i.e. used in domain-specific contexts)

Language for General Purposes (LGP)

The language used very day to talk about ordinary things in a variety of common situations

De-terminologization

the process whereby terms that once belonged exclusively to a specialized domain are used in general language (Meyer and Mackintosh, 2000)

English for Special Purposes (ESP)

English used in domain- specific contexts e.g. legal English, medical English, business English

Mono-referentiality

Semantic uniqueness of the terms used

Transparency

Possibility to promptly access a term’s meaning through its surface form

Precision

Immediate reference of every term to its own concept

Conservatism

ONLY IN SOME DISCIPLINES permanence of traditional linguistic traits e.g. legal English

Elliptic forms of relative clauses

avoidance of relative clauses to make the sentence structure lighter

Thematic development

the way information is organized into a message (Theme/Rheme)

Theme

the element that goes first in a clause ➽ the departure point of the message

Rheme

the element that comes after the Theme ➽ the development of the Theme

Popularization

A vast class of various types of communicative events or genres that involve the transformation of specialized knowledge into ‘everyday’ or ‘lay’ knowledge, as well as a recontextualization of scientific discourse, for instance, in the realm of the public discourses of the mass media or other institutions.

Illustration

A popularization strategy used to introduce new knowledge and 'to relate new knowledge to old (perhaps experiential) knowledge' (Turnbull, 2018: 204)

Reformulation

A popularization strategy used when what has been presented requires a clarification.

Swales’ CARS model

Model which describes the structure of Introductions to research articles.

Move

Discoursal or rhetorical unit that performs a coherent communicative function in a written or spoken discourse.

Step

Elements in a move whose function is that of achieving the purpose of the move to which they belong

integral Citation

The cited author is grammatically part of a sentence

Non-integral Citation

The cited author is given in parentheses or refereed to by a number.