Textual organisation and construal of interpersonal meanings in different genres of medical texts

This thesis investigates thematic organisation and construal of interpersonal evaluative meanings in the Introduction (Beginning) and Discussion (Concluding) sections of two medical genres: medical research articles (RAs) and medical review articles (reviews). Situated within EAP educational context, the study aims to examine variations between medical professionals and PhD candidates in academic writing, thus assisting candidates for successful academic publication. Two sets of corpus data are established, which involve published professional medical papers and students draft medical writings. Linguistic analyses concerning thematic structures and evaluative stances are explored, drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Appraisal theory. The major findings reveal that PhD candidates demonstrate capabilities of handling textual organisation and construction of interpersonal meanings in medical RA genre.However, some problems do arise when they compose their review drafts. The pedagogical implications of this research for the motivation of PhD candidates, for discourse-based writing approach and for raising awareness of organsing textual and interpersonal aspects of meanings in academic writing instruction are considered.These elements may provide useful insights in informing curriculum design for academic writing and publication

An analysis of stance and voice in research articles across Chinese and British cultures, using the Appraisal Framework

Scholars from Mainland China are increasingly publishing in the medium of English, in order to gain visibility and credibility worldwide. However, the visibility of Chinese scholars in the Social Sciences is strikingly low. Due to the holistic, interpretative, reiterative nature of knowledge in the Social Sciences, writers have to work harder to establish personal credibility through claim-making negotiations, sharing sympathetic understanding and promoting tolerance in their readers (Becher, 1994; Becher & Trowler, 2001; Hyland, 2000). This thesis investigates differences in stance and voice style between scholars from Mainland China and Britain so as to derive new information which might be useful to novice researchers in the Social Sciences (particularly applied linguistics) who intend to publish internationally. A corpus of 30 research articles in applied linguistics was analysed in terms of Appraisal Theory (Martin & White 2005), theory of context (Xu & Nesi, 2017) and genre analysis (Swales 1990, 2004), using the UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell 2011). Findings from this analysis suggest that both the Chinese and the British authors are aware of the need to argue for their own opinions and maintain good relationships with their readers, but choose contrasting ways to realize these same purposes. Generally the Chinese authors try to maintain writer-reader relationships by avoiding explicit attitudinal evaluation of the work of others, while the British authors try to maintain writer-reader relationships by toning down or only evoking stance. The Chinese authors argue for their own positions by reinforcing their explicit attitudes, adding multiple references, sharpening the completion of tasks and construing claims as unquestioned, whereas the British authors argue for their own positions by explicitly evaluating people and phenomena. Because the statistically significant differences in stance and voice strategies revealed in this thesis indicate differences between Chinese and British scholars’ argumentative styles, they suggest the need for a new way of perceiving Chinese ethnolinguistic impact on research writing, and might also inform the teaching of academic writing in the social sciences

Metadiscourse markers in Dr. Zakir Naik's persuasive discourse

The International speaker Dr Zakir Naik has been the target of many studies for his influential speeches. Analysing persuasive speeches can be tackled from different angles, amongst which is the functional markers of persuasion represented by the Metadiscourse markers. Dr Zakir Naik's persuasive speeches have never been analyzed from a metadiscourse perspective. This paper aims to investigate the types and functions of metadiscourse markers in Zakir Naik's speeches. After transcribing Zakir Naik's videos manually, the coding process was accomplished via NVivo software and Microsoft Excel. Applying Dafouz-Milne's (2008) categories in the codification process, the interpersonal and textual metadiscourse markers are revealed. In terms of interpersonal metadiscourse markers, commentaries have been chiefly employed, contributing to Naik's relation to the audience. In terms of the textual metadiscourse markers, logical markers showed the highest usage. Such markers help in connecting his various persuasion strategies and multi-argument to make them smoothly connected. This paper has found that, generally, Zakir Naik has effectively developed and promoted his arguments via the extensive use of various metadiscourse tools while establishing an excellent relationship with the audience to attain a continuous relationship. This paper also argues that a fruitful approach to explore the interpersonal and textual definitions of language is Dafouz- Milne's categorization of metadiscourse markers as a powerful methodological tool in discourse analysis

Shifts in the Translation of Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in Arabic and English Opinion Articles

This study aims to investigate the ‘shifts’ in the translation of ‘interactional metadiscourse markers’ in Arabic-English and English-Arabic newspaper opinion articles to uncover the translation ‘norms’ governing these shifts. To my knowledge, there is hardly any research on the translation of interactional metadiscourse in the genre of opinion articles, especially in reference to Arabic and English as a language pair. To this end, two types of quantitative and qualitative comparative analyses are conducted, namely a comparative analysis between the Arabic and English STs and their respective TTs and a comparative analysis between the Arabic and English original STs. The former identifies the translation shifts in interactional metadiscourse markers and the latter compares the type and extent of interactional metadiscourse markers between the two languages. The translation norms are reconstructed based on the analysis of translation shifts and with reference to the results of the comparative analysis between the original Arabic and English STs. The comparative analyses are conducted following a corpus-based comparative discourse analysis approach within the tradition of product-oriented descriptive translation studies (Toury, 1995). The theoretical framework is based on Hyland’s (2005a, 2005b) model of interactional metadiscourse and the concepts of shift (van Leuven-Zwart, 1989/1990a; Toury, 1995) and norms (Toury, 1995) in Translation Studies. The results of the analysis of translation shifts identify four main types of shifts in interactional metadiscourse markers that are addition, omission, modification, and substitution. These shifts are constrained by textual-linguistic translation norms that seem to be influenced by differences and/or similarities in genre conventions, socio-political and cultural aspects between the two languages, which are revealed by the comparative analysis between the original Arabic and English opinion articles. The textual-linguistic norms in both directions of translation suggest that Arabic-English translators employ both initial norms of acceptability and adequacy with a stronger preference for the former, whereas English-Arabic translators tend to employ the norm of acceptability

Reasoning Is for Arguing: Understanding the Successes and Failures of Deliberation

Theoreticians of deliberative democracy have sometimes found it hard to relate to the seemingly contradictory experimental results produced by psychologists and political scientists. We suggest that this problem may be alleviated by inserting a layer of psychological theory between the empirical results and the normative political theory. In particular, we expose the argumentative theory of reasoning that makes the observed pattern of findings more coherent. According to this theory, individual reasoning mechanisms work best when used to produce and evaluate arguments during a public deliberation. It predicts that when diverse opinions are discussed, group reasoning will outperform individual reasoning. It also predicts that individuals have a strong confirmation bias. When people reason either alone or with like-minded peers, this confirmation bias leads them to reinforce their initial attitudes, explaining individual and group polarization. We suggest that the failures of reasoning are most likely to be remedied at the collective than at the individual level