Book
1st International Conference on Corpus Analysis in Academic Discourse
This conference aims to provide language researchers with an opportunity to present and communicate their work from a variety of corpus analysis and academic discourse studies perspectives. For the 1st International Conference on Corpus Analysis in Academic Discourse, particular attention will be paid to corpus studies and academic discourse analysis (whether monolingual or multilingual). This conference is framed within the Research Project FFI2016-77941-p (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain). The particular aim of CAAD’17 is thus to examine the means by which corpus linguistics attempts to detect and analyze different aspects of academic discourse in order to achieve a better understanding of how they function in the language system.
The article formulates a linguistic understanding of the writer’s self-presentation in the English-language written academic discourse based on findings of sociological and psychological studies of the phenomenon. The article postulates obligatory manifestation of the writer’s self-presentation in the current written academic discourse and relies in analyzing the self-presentation strategy on the self-presentation intentional structure described in social psychology. In compliance with the intentional structure of written academic discourse described by T. Kubrak, a model of the self-presentation communicative structure is suggested. It is assumed to contain the self-characterizaion strategy split into the communicative tactic of describing research findings and their significance and the persuasive strategy divided into the logical argumentation tactic and intensification tactic. It is concluded that the writer can use the self-presentation communicative tactics mentioned either deliberately or not.
Nowadays great attention is paid both to knowledge reproduction-reception mechanisms, and technologies of relevant knowledge transferring. Relating to this, academic discourse research and discourse strategies of scientific knowledge transferring are in the focus of special attention. As far as English written academic discourse in Economics is underestimated in the process of studying, this research is of great timeliness. Discourse markers (DMs) play an important role in the process of text generation, in providing discourse grammar and sense integrity and optimization in transferring information from addresser to addressee. But beyond modern research are the aspects of DMs functioning depending on the level of students' professional and communicative competencies. The article focuses on special features of discourse markers in academic discourse in Economics. It is based on English written texts produced by Russian students majoring in Economics with different competence. The main objective is to reveal the difference of discourse markers functioning in terms of the level of students' foreign language professional competence. The authors succeeded in extending the DMs classification. Qualitative and quantitative analysis revealed the peculiarities in DMs functioning in academic discourse in Economics. The prevailing DMs are those which introduce new or additional information, taking the leading position in professional discourse in comparison with nonprofessional one. The second and the third positions in both discourses belong to the contrastive DMs and MDs of author's assessment. However, the qualitative analysis revealed that written texts of professional discourse highlighted the tendency of using DMs of different groups. It can be explained by students' high level of professional skills and, thus, by their ability to transfer scientific knowledge (by their high communicative competence). The peculiarity of DMs functioning in nonprofessional discourse is the occurrence of the same marker or monotony in using markers in one written text. It can be explained by the lack of the ability to use the cognitive-communicative strategy in transferring economic knowledge effectively. The research allows to substantially specify the understanding of creating and transferring the special knowledge process in English by non-natives. Moreover, it enables us to expand the understanding of academic discourse in a special sphere. The developed data can be the basis for differentiating of academic discourse, heterogeneous in its learning. DMs functioning regularities in terms of the level of foreign language professional competence are identified. Also, the prospects for further research in the sphere of DMs in academic discourse functioning are determined.
This paper deals with professional / non-professional degree of academic discourse by analyzing cognitive metaphor models in the English written texts produced by students with different competence in economics. It distinguishes a set of features that characterize academic and professional discourse. It also focuses on the problem of developing professional competence in economics.
The article addresses the problem of forming communicative strategies and tactics of English-language written academic discourse as a means of reaching professional foreign language communicative competence by a university graduate in Russia. The article investigates the importance of forming the communicative strategy of mitigating self-presentation in written academic communication. The author attempts to determine the set of communicative tactics making up the mentioned strategy. Emphasis is placed on specifying the techniques composing these tactics and their language patterns. The article can be interesting for all those who are engaged in teaching foreign language written academic communication at universities.
The book addresses the issue of concessives in Russian and analyzes the semantics of Russian concessive expressions. The first chapter explicates the core meaning of all Russian concessives. It is based on the simpler senses of condition and negation. The second chapter defines the main modifications of the core meaning along the lines of semantic conversion and actantial addition, as well as semantic shifts concerning the senses of probability, desirability and degree. The third chapter describes the meanings of more than sixty cocessive items in Russian. The fourth chapter provides corpus analysis of the Russian concessive constructions, in particular, their semantic and combinatorial properties. The fifth and the sixth chapters consider concession among similar lexico-grammatical meanings. The seventh chapter presents lexicographic descriptions of concessives in the Active dictionary of Russian.
Automatic verb-noun collocation extraction is an important natural language processing task. The results obtained in this area of research can be used in a variety of applications including language modeling, thesaurus building, semantic role labeling, and machine translation. Our paper de-scribes an experiment aimed at comparing the verb-noun collocation lists extracted from a large corpus using a raw word order-based and a syntax-based approach. The hypothesis was that the latter method would result in less noisy and more exhaustive collocation sets. The experiment has shown that the collocation sets obtained using the two methods have a surprisingly low degree of correspondence. Moreover, the collocate lists extracted by means of the window-based method are often more complete than the ones obtained by means of the syntax-based algorithm, despite its ability to filter out adjacent collocates and reach the distant ones. In order to interpret these differences, we provide a qualitative analysis of some common mismatch cases.
This research studies professional and non-professional levels of academic discourse by analyzing cognitive metaphor models in the English written texts produced by Russian students with different competence in economics. The results of comparative analysis of specific features in metaphor models in two types of academic discourses – professional and non-professional – reveal the difference how students at different levels of study develop their professional competence in their core curriculum disciplines. At an early stage students predominantly use external associations in metaphors, and at a later stage – internal/personal verbal associations. The research results might be significant for more targeted identification of ESAP content.
The book is a study of the academic public presentation and its prosodic aspect.
Students' internet usage attracts the attention of many researchers in different countries. Differences in internet penetration in diverse countries lead us to ask about the interaction of medium and culture in this process. In this paper we present an analysis based on a sample of 825 students from 18 Russian universities and discuss findings on particularities of students' ICT usage. On the background of the findings of the study, based on data collected in 2008-2009 year during a project "A сross-cultural study of the new learning culture formation in Germany and Russia", we discuss the problem of plagiarism in Russia, the availability of ICT features in Russian universities and an evaluation of the attractiveness of different categories of ICT usage and gender specifics in the use of ICT.