Concessive constructions in English business letter discourse

2008 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Vergaro
Keyword(s):  
Genre Analysis ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Traditional Grammar ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis paper presents an analysis of the pragmatic use of concessive constructions in business letter discourse. In linguistics, concession has been analyzed primarily within concessive clauses, which have been widely studied, either alone or compared with other syntactic categories such as adversative, causal, or conditional clauses. The term ‘concessive’ itself belongs to the terminology developed within traditional grammar to classify adverbials and adverbial clauses. Heretofore, less attention has been paid to the pragmatic use of concession, i.e., the way in which concessive constructions strategically function within a specific context. The context under analysis in this paper is that of the ‘business letter’ genre. Analysis of a corpus of English business letters shows that concessive constructions are used in this genre both for propositional (or ideational) and procedural (or interpersonal) reasons. This paper considers only the second to be truly pragmatic. Preference for the first or second strategy depends on the text types belonging to the genre. When procedural reasons prevail, concession is mostly introduced for politeness reasons, politeness being one of the factors constantly at play in business exchanges.

Once upon a Beer Desert

Vegas Brews ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 37-66
Author(s):  
Michael Ian Borer
Keyword(s):  
Las Vegas ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Dual Roles ◽  
Craft Beer ◽  
The Way

Chapter 1 shows how the specific context of Las Vegas has stunted the growth of the local craft beer scene. The way that context is understood in this case is primarily through the city’s reputation and dominant imagery. The way that people outside of Las Vegas think about Las Vegas affects how people live inside of it. The city’s reputational constraints are exposed through a diagnosis of a condition that affects the way Las Vegas is often (mis)interpreted. I call this the Las Vegas Syndrome. Yet while this dis-ease is most evident on and emanating from the Strip, the Strip plays dual roles as foe and friend to craft beer drinkers.

scholarly journals A Neuro Linguistic Programming’s modelling process for the development of and guidance to congregations: An adaptive ministry

2019 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Bester ◽  
Johann A. Meylahn
Keyword(s):  
Practical Theology ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Phd Thesis ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Modelling Process ◽  
The Way

Several congregations in the workspace of the Netherdutch Reformed Church of Africa are losing viability and sustainability. This can be attributed to various factors, the most prominent being isolation. Isolation is defined here as the inability of some congregations to move away from maintenance and an inward focus towards making necessary adjustments on the way to a dimension of missional focus. While commitment and enthusiasm are present in the work of all congregations, some find it difficult to adapt their established ideas and in some cases obsolete customs and traditions. Other congregations have made the necessary adjustments by defining themselves as missional. In congregations where constructive change occurs, the focus moves to undertake congregational ministries. The congregation not only gains insight into their own situation but also becomes aware of God’s calling for that specific congregation within a specific context. The focus shifts from their own situation and needs to the needs and challenges of the context surrounding the specific congregation. A consequence of this change in focus is that the whole ministry of the congregation adjusts accordingly. These congregations discover their own unique spirituality and begin to ask: For whom do we exist? The article is based on a PhD thesis, where Osmer’s four questions of practical theology were brought into the conversation with the modelling process of neuro-linguistic programming, in an attempt to sojourn with congregations towards a contextual missional focus. This research was undertaken to expand Osmer’s four questions of practical theology by using the modelling process of neuro-linguistic programming so that congregations may succeed in making the necessary adjustments.

Blindness and limits: Sophokles and the logic of myth

1980 ◽  
Vol 100 ◽  
pp. 22-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. G. A. Buxton
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Dramatic Technique ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Dramatic Voice ◽  
The Way

To generalize about Aischylos is difficult; to generalize about Euripides is almost impossible; but to generalize about Sophokles is both possible and potentially rewarding. With Sophokles—or, rather, with the Sophokles of the seven fully extant tragedies—we can sense a mood, a use of language, and a style of play-making (‘dramatic technique’) which are largely shared by all seven works. Of these characteristics it is surely the mood which contains the quintessence of Sophoklean tragedy. My aim in the first section of this paper will be to open the way to an appreciation of that mood by following up one of the most important motifs in Sophokles: blindness. In the second section the scope of the enquiry will be widened: I shall show that, in using the blindness motif, Sophokles was drawing on a theme which was fundamental to a large number of mythical narratives told by Greeks from the time of Homer to that of Pausanias, and beyond. In the final section we shall return to Sophokles, placing him this time not against the background of the whole Greek mythical tradition but rather within the specific context of the fifth century B.C., and attempting to overhear the individual dramatic ‘voice’ used by him as he explored the implications of blindness.

scholarly journals Grammaticalization by changing co-text frequencies, or why [BE Ving] became the ‘progressive’

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER PETRÉ
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Functional Changes ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Functional Development ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
The Way

While the ‘progressive’ construction [BE Ving] (Hewas playing tenniswhen Jane came in) has been studied extensively both diachronically and synchronically, studies of its functional development tend not to extend further back than Early Modern English. This article draws attention to the functional changes [BE Ving] goes through already in Middle English, whose analysis sheds new light on the principles of early grammaticalization. To understand the observed changes, all uses of [BE Ving] are considered, not only those that have a clear verbal and aspectual function. During Middle English, important changes occurred in the frequencies of the various co-texts of [BE Ving]. They involve the increase in backgrounding adverbial clauses, which leads to the semanticization of ongoingness, a feature that was initially only associated with [BE Ving] by pragmatic implicature. The outcome is grammaticalization by co-text: co-textual changes paved the way for the acquisition of progressive semantics in [BE Ving] itself.

scholarly journals Move Analysis of Legal Justifications in Constitutional Tribunal Judgments in Poland: What They Share and What They Do Not

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-600 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski
Keyword(s):  
Common Core ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Genre Analysis ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
Written Discourse ◽  
Rhetorical Structure ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Constitutional Tribunal ◽  
The Way

Abstract It appears that we know surprisingly little about how judges frame linguistically the rationale behind their decisions and how such texts are structured. Using the concept of rhetorical moves (Swales in Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990; Bhatia in Analyzing genre-language use in professional settings, Longman, London, 1993, Worlds of written discourse. A genre-based view, Continuum, London, 2004), this paper adopts a genre-based approach to examine the rhetorical structure of legal justifications provided in the decisions of the Polish Constitutional Court (Trybunał Konstytucyjny). The goal of the study is to verify the claim that the way justifications are drafted is becoming more and more uniform and conventional. The results show that there is a common core of rhetorical structure realized by means of recurrent functional segments of text. This paper proposes a prototypical move structure of a Constitutional Tribunal justification and it argues that that the way justifications are drafted are subject to very concrete, even if not explicitly stated constraints.

On the Fluidity of Institutional Change: Complex Interrelations Between Multiple Types of Institutional Work During the Serbian Transition

2020 ◽  
pp. 105649262094968
Author(s):  
Andreea Zara ◽  
Héléne Delacour
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Change ◽  
Feedback Loops ◽  
Emergent Properties ◽  
Institutional Work ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Societal Level ◽  
The Way

To extend the understanding of institutional change at the societal level, we explore the way in which multiple types of institutional work are interrelated, and how the interrelations affect both the institutional change and its outcome. Through an in-depth study of the Serbian transition between 2000 and 2008, our findings reveal first that this specific context expands the range of institutional work, for example, the pressure and capitalization work performed by the Mafia, tycoons, and opportunistic politicians in our case. Second, we highlight four complex characteristics of the interrelations between multiple types of institutional work: feedback loops, non-linearity, emergent properties, and discontinuity. We contribute to the neo-institutional literature by showing the importance to attend to the interrelations between multiple types of institutional work performed by different actors, as to understand institutional change, its fluidity, complexity, and its outcome.

It-extraposition in English

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunther Kaltenböck
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Functional Category ◽  
Thematic Structure ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Information Status ◽  
Text Types ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
The Way

This paper investigates the communicative use ofit-extraposition (e.g.It is surprising that John went to London) in texts, based on a corpus analysis of 1,701 instances in the British component of theInternational Corpus of English. Contrary to the wayit-extraposition is often treated in the literature, it does not represent a uniform functional category whose communicative purpose arises mainly from its status as the stylistically unmarked counterpart of non-extraposition. An analysis of the information status of the extraposed subject shows that it is possible to distinguish two basic types (Given Complement Extraposition and New Complement Extraposition) which differ fundamentally in their communicative potential and distribution in different (spoken and written) text types. For each of the two informational types a number of specific uses in texts are identified taking into account thematic structure (topic-comment) and the semantic nature of the matrix predicate.

scholarly journals TYPES AND FUNCTIONS OF CITATIONS IN MASTER’S THESES ACROSS DISCIPLINES AND LANGUAGES

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raheleh Bahadofar ◽  
Javad Gholami
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Citation Practices ◽  
Thesis Writing ◽  
The Way

Citation is an essential and common feature of academic writing and is used by academicwriters to achieve different purposes. This study investigated disciplinary variationsin terms of citation practices in the genre of Master’s theses with a specific focus ondiscussions. To this end, sixty discussions produced by MA/MS students of two keyuniversities in Iran from both hard and soft disciplines were analyzed in terms of citationtypes and functions. The medium of writing whether English or Persian was also takeninto account for its probable influence on the employed citation practices. The resultsrevealed that integral citations were used more frequently by writers in soft knowledgefields, allowing them to make evaluations, whereas non-integral citations were mostlyused by hard discipline writers. As for rhetorical functions, Support and Comparison werethe dominant functions in these text types. However, there existed subtle differences bothin the degree and the way these writers draw intertextual links to their disciplines. Thefindings can be of considerable help to EAP instructors and thesis supervisors to raise theirstudents’ awareness and refine their understanding of citation strategies in thesis writing.

scholarly journals TED Talks: A genre analysis

Revista X ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 1552
Author(s):  
José Augusto Simões de Miranda ◽  
Maria Ester Wollstein Moritz
Keyword(s):  
Genre Analysis ◽  
Rhetorical Structure ◽  
Diverse Audience ◽  
Ted Talks ◽  
Speaker Presentation ◽  
The Way

This research aims at investigating TED Talks as a genre. The analysis focuses on its rhetorical structure, characterized by moves and steps and the communicative purposes of the genre. The corpus comprises 10 talks selected from the website TED Talks. The data are discussed in the light of Bhatia’s (1996/2004) and Swales’ (1990/2004) theories of genre. Results demonstrate that, in terms of the analysis of the rhetorical structure, it reveals a constant pattern of moves and steps along the corpus, since every talk contained the five moves identified by the analysis. These cyclical and more frequent moves are: topic introduction, speaker presentation, topic development, concluding messages, and acknowledgments/gratitude. In terms of its communicative purpose, TED aims to celebrate ideas to a diverse audience worldwide, due to the variety of topics encompassed. This study also allowed us to develop a deeper view of this spoken genre, its features, and the way individuals may benefit from it in their lives.

scholarly journals Masculinity, Parody and Propaganda in the “Transylvanians” Trilogy

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-108
Author(s):  
Claudia Ioana Doroholschi
Keyword(s):  
Communist Regime ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Successful Series ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Face ◽  
Entertainment Value ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe article focuses on the successful series of Red Westerns/Easterns produced in Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, known as the “Transylvanians” trilogy. The article will look at the films in the specific context of the period, one characterized by the increasingly idiosyncratic evolution of the Romanian communist regime and by growing economic difficulties, and will examine the way in which the films construct models of masculinity at the intersection between three different types of masculine models: those of the American Western (whether adopted or parodied), those of traditional Romania (such as the idealized, wise peasant), and masculine typologies derived from communist propaganda. I will argue that the films skillfully balance the tension between a critique of American models, in the face of which Romanian models emerge as superior, and legitimizing themselves as well as relying heavily in their entertainment value on the very models of the American Western they are supposed to subvert.

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