Abstract

Academic discourse is characterized by an abundance of abstract nouns such as analysis, research, process, concept, approach or role. These nouns are considered cohesive devices since their full content is determined by referring to their context and they have received numerous denominations (anaphoric, signaling, carrier, shell or metadiscursive nouns). This paper explores the metadiscursive role of shell nouns in a corpus of academic abstracts written by university students for their Senior Theses, based on Schmid’s (2000) and Jiang and Hyland’s (2016, 2017) proposals. The rhetorical, persuasive potential of these abstract nouns in this type of academic discourse is also addressed. The results show that advanced EFL writers deploy a wide range of abstract nouns in patterns that resemble those of scholars (Jiang & Hyland 2017). Different moves in the text seem to influence the type of noun employed. All in all, advanced English Studies majors are aware of academic disciplinary conventions but would benefit from training in abstract writing, particularly in the distribution of the text’s moves.

Abstract

The focus in this paper is on structural and functional properties of a marginal type of focus formulas in English, known as N-be-that-constructions (Schmid 2001), cf. The problem is that he is jealous. They are referred to here as focus formulas with shell nouns (FFSNs). The role of the nouns in these templates is to create conceptual shells (Schmid 1997) into which the propositional content is encapsulated, with both the parts being co-referentially linked. The BNC data have revealed two manifestations of FFSNs in discourse: they occurred either as fixed utterance-initial templates (The thing is that killing got to be a habit.), or as looser configurations, co-occurring with various discourse signposts (DSs), as in Mm. well I mean there’s the the other thing is you see… My view, inspired by Schmid (2001) and outlined in Válková and Tárnyiková (2015), is that the FFSNs can have a dual role in discourse, operating either as focalizers or as discourse signposts participating in a number of pragmatic strategies associated with facework. The aim is to argue for the validity of this claim and give evidence of and reasoning for the focality loss cases.

Abstract

Encapsulation by means of abstract unspecific nouns (such as conclusion, topic, reality or problem) reifies predicative discourse chunks and conceptualise them. This ability is inherent to encapsulators or shell nouns (Schmid 2000), a functional class privileged to signposting the structure of formal genres such as parliamentary debate (PD) and thus exhibiting their close link to metadiscourse. On the basis of a corpus of PD in Catalan, Spanish and English, our study deals with the metadiscursive function of some structures including an encapsulator. The framework provided by Hyland (2004) and Hyland & Tse (2005) is taking into account with this purpose. The different structures used by the addressor to organise the discourse and to interact with his or her potential addressees are analysed. The analysis of these variously fixed structures leads to establish five homogeneous cross-linguistic classes: textual organisers, sentential adjuncts, lexical connectives (Cuenca 1998), modal locutions, and two copular patterns. These classes are described functionally, formally and from their discourse functioning. Their relations with the two aspects of metadiscourse, textual and interpersonal, are observed, considering the fuzzy boundaries between both aspects.