A Comparative Analysis of Sorry for and Sorry about in Two Corpora

The ultimate goal of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of Sorry for and Sorry about in the COCA and BNC. When it comes to the COCA, it is interesting to point out that the types Sorry for and Sorry about show the same pattern in the TV/movie and fiction genres and the academic genre, whereas they show a different pattern in the blog, web, magazine, newspaper genres and the spoken genre. With respect to the BNC, it is significant to note that Sorry for and Sorry about show the same pattern in the fiction genre and the spoken genre, whereas they show a different pattern in the newspaper and magazine genres and the misc, non-academic and academic genres. It can thus be inferred that these two types are synonymously used, but they are slightly different from each other in their use. A major point to note that in the COCA, Sorry for is the furthest type from Sorry about in the TV/movie genre, whereas Sorry for is the nearest type to Sorry about in the academic genre. A further point to note is that in the BNC, Sorry for is the furthest type from Sorry about in the spoken genre, whereas Sorry for is the nearest type to Sorry about in the academic genre. The COCA clearly shows that Sorry for people is the most preferable one for Americans, followed by Sorry for Mr., Sorry for me, and Sorry for Mrs., in that order. The COCA shows, on the other hand, that Sorry about dinner is the most preferable one for Americans, followed by Sorry about lunch, Sorry about Mr., Sorry about agent, and Sorry about that, in descending order. The COCA clearly indicates that the expression Sorry for being is the most preferable one among Americans, followed by Sorry for interrupting, Sorry for having, Sorry for getting, and Sorry for making, in descending order. The COCA also shows that the expression Sorry about being is the most preferable one for Americans, followed by Sorry about getting, Sorry about calling, and Sorry about leaving (Sorry about having), in that order. It is worth noting that only two nouns (Mr. and things) can be the collocations of both Sorry about and Sorry for. It is also worth pointing out that eleven of thirteen seven gerunds are linked to both Sorry about and Sorry for. This in turn suggests that Sorry about and Sorry for are interchangeably used, but they are somewhat different from each other in their use.

Gratitude communication in academic written acknowledgement

In the existing literature, no attempt has been made to inspect how men and women rhetorically manage their gratitude communications in the academic written discourse. To bridge this knowledge gap, the present article examined how students of different gender construct their thanking acts in the acknowledgements of their M.A. theses. Discrepancies between male and female postgraduates’ employment of linguistic patterns and gratitude themes were compared. The results showed that student writers’ gratitude communications to a certain extent are conditioned by the conventional rhetorical patterns of the academic genre. Remarkable gender variations were evidenced in the students’ selections of lexical items for encoding the thanking expressions, thanking modifiers, and gratitude themes of their acknowledgements. These gender discrepancies in gratitude communications are highly pertinent to the social expectations of masculinity and femininity, the students’ psychological orientations toward the emotion of thanking and their own value priorities.

Communicating disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience in 3MT presentations: How students engage with popularization of science

3MT (Three-minute thesis) presentations, in which students communicate their theses to non-specialist audiences within three minutes, have emerged as an important academic genre, echoing current practices in scientific communication where researchers report their research work to a heterogeneous audience. Although increasing attention has been paid to 3MT presentations, we still lack sufficient knowledge of how presenters should communicate disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience. To address this gap, this corpus-based study investigates the rhetorical organization of moves (i.e. discoursal units serving various coherent communicative functions in text) in 80 3MT presentations from six disciplines. It is found that orientation, rationale, purpose, methods and results are five obligatory moves, among which the results move comprises more than one-fifth of the total length. The rationale and results moves are more often applied in hard sciences than in soft knowledge fields. The findings shed light on advanced academic literacy and how students communicate disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience.

Metadiscourse variations in the generic structure of disciplinary research articles

Research articles have begun to occupy the status of a prominent academic genre, as publishing one is a significant way to gain credibility and to establish oneself as a researcher among members of a discourse community. One way to distinguish discourse communities is to look at the linguistic features used in the generic structure of their research articles. One of these linguistic features is metadiscourse which deals with the connection between authors, texts and readers. The present study adopted Hyland’s (2005a) model of metadiscourse to compare the use of interactional markers in the moves of 40 research article introductions from Applied Linguistics and Chemistry. Findings indicated some variations in the way that disciplinary authors employed interactional devices in introduction moves. These findings can be discussed in terms of familiarizing novice writers with discipline-specific features of their research article introduction and interpersonality in establishing a link between a text and readers.

Genre Analysis of Research Article Abstracts in English for Academic Purposes Journals: Exploring the Possible Variations across the Venues of Research

Research article (RA) abstracts play a pivotal role in settling the fate of the academic papers. Despite the abundance of research on investigating the generic structure of this academic genre, the variations in its move patterns between the two venues within a single area of research seem to have remained untouched. The current study attempted to explore the constituent moves and move patterns of RA abstracts published in a local (Iranian Journal of English for Academic Purposes) and an international (The Journal of English for Academic Purposes) journal in the field of applied linguistics. Drawing on Hyland’s (2000) five-move model, the RA abstracts were analyzed. The results indicated that the abstracts published in the two journals included the conventional moves. Furthermore, the most frequent moves were the purpose, method, and product in the two corpora. Moreover, although the results of the chi-square test pointed to no significant difference in terms of the frequency of the moves in the abstracts, the analysis divulged variations in the move patterns across the two sets of articles. The findings carry pedagogical implications for the academic writing course designers, materials developers, and instructors to enhance the novice researchers’ familiarity with the writing conventions to facilitate their accommodation by the scientific communities.

Scaffolding the Case Analysis in an Organizational Behavior Course: Making Analytical Language Explicit

This article describes an innovative interdisciplinary collaboration between English faculty and an organizational behavior (OB) professor to scaffold case analysis writing in an upper-level OB course at an English-medium university in the Middle East. Case analysis writing is challenging for students as an academic genre or type of writing because they do not always know when to report on the case, when to explain OB concepts, and when to go beyond reporting or explaining by using analysis in support of claims. Combining the English faculty’s linguistic knowledge with the OB professor’s disciplinary knowledge, we developed visual support materials to make the valued features of case analysis writing explicit for students. We describe two sets of instructional materials that we used to help students meet genre expectations. We provide evidence from multiple data sources, including on-going analysis of student writing, that points to the effectiveness of our innovative interdisciplinary collaboration. Our findings provide evidence of the benefits of distributed responsibilities in teaching and assessing university students’ communication skills in disciplinary contexts, particularly for L2 learners.

“Comencemos por el título”: la representación integral de la investigación doctoral en contadas palabras

Este trabajo sigue la línea de investigación del grupo Corpus EspaDA-UNCuyo (Corpus de Español en el Discurso Académico de la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo)[1]. Partiendo del potencial de la escritura para transformar el conocimiento, se propone la (re)escritura del título temático del género académico “proyecto de tesis” como una instancia de reflexión y afianzamiento del evento de investigación doctoral. Delimitar formalmente el tema de tesis es uno de los mayores problemas de los doctorandos y uno de los motivos recurrentes de incumplimiento de los plazos establecidos institucionalmente para la entrega de los proyectos. Contextualizado en un caso de intervención pedagógica en la carrera de Doctorado en Agronomía, este trabajo adopta un diseño cualitativo, descriptivo, longitudinal y aplicado. Los datos documentales provienen de (a)proyectos de admisión a carrera; (b)proyectos de tesis; (c)transcripciones de defensas orales de proyectos de tesis. Los resultados sugieren que, tanto la modelización y explicitación del proceso de escritura académico-científica, como las tareas colaborativas de (re)escritura de títulos temáticos entre pares profesionales expertos, favorecen el afianzamiento y la reflexión sobre el evento integral de la investigación y sobre su contribución original al campo disciplinar, requisito primero de toda tesis doctoral. [1] Proyecto SeCTyP 06/G718 Construcción de un corpus de discurso académico escrito y oral de la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo con metodología de lingüística de corpus. Proyecciones hacia ámbitos científicos y didáctico-pedagógicos (2016-2018). https://espada.uncu.edu.ar/index.php?sec=proyectos Proyecto SIIP 06/G785 Corpus EspaDA-UNCuyo: Diseño y precompilación de un corpus del discurso académico oral y escrito de la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (2019-2021). https://espada.uncu.edu.ar/index.php?sec=proyectos This article is part of the research of the Corpus EspaDA-UNCuyo team. Starting from the potential of writing to transform knowledge, we aim to (re)write the thematic title of the academic genre "thesis project" as an instance of reflection on and consolidation of the processes involved in doctoral research. The formal delimitation of the thesis topic is one of the biggest problems for doctoral students and one of the recurring reasons for non-compliance with the institutionally established deadlines for project presentation. Contextualized within an agronomy Ph.D. program, our research adopts a qualitative, descriptive, longitudinal and applied design. The documentary data come from (a) admission projects to a Ph.D. program; (b) thesis projects; (c) transcripts of oral vivas of thesis projects. The findings suggest that the modeling and clarification of the academic-scientific writing process, as well as the collaborative tasks of (re) writing thematic titles between expert professional peers, favour the consolidation of, and reflection on research understood as an integral process. The modeling and clarification of the academic-scientific writing process also elicits reflection on the contribution to the disciplinary field, the first requirement of a doctoral thesis.

Appraisal Resources in an Academic Genre: English versus Persian Nutrition Research Articles

Academic study writers utilize a specific set of discursive resources backed up by both cultural and professional norms to be endorsed by the intended audience. The current study aimed to investigate if there were any significant differences between English and Persian academic research articles published in peer-reviewed journals in the field of nutrition in light of appraisal theory. To this end, a corpus of 40 English and 40 Persian academic research articles was analyzed in terms of three categories and subcategories of appraisal theory. The results revealed that the authors of both English and Persian research articles included more attitude resources followed by graduation and engagement resources. Furthermore, no significant difference was observed between these two sets of articles in terms of three major appraisal categories. The findings carry pedagogical implications for English for academic purposes courses to provide the academic discourse communities with the required discursive competencies.

The rhetorical structure of analytical writing: a developmental approach

Analytical writing is an academic genre that combines features of expository and argumentative discourse. Although the ability to write analytically is crucial to succeed at school and beyond, the pathway to master this type of writing mode has rarely been explored. We analyzed the writings of 226 native-speakers of Iberian Spanish from elementary school, high school and university levels, each of whom wrote two texts in Spanish. Three types of rhetorical moves were identified based on the communicative goals of analytical writing: expository, argumentative, and assertive. The findings show a developmental improvement in rhetorical structure and a transition from assertion-based texts, where writers focus on their own standpoint as the pivot of the text, to exposition-based texts, where presentation and discussion of data and of evidence become more dominant.

Ilya Heifetz’s violin concerto: revisiting the issue of the Jewish national identity

The article considers the instrumental creative work of a modern Russian-Israely composer Ilya Heifetz. His life and creative experience has two definite stages: Russian (before 1991) and Israely, and each of them is marked with the problem of reconsidering national roots in life and work. One of the examples of addressing this problem in Heifetz’s compositions of the Soviet period is his violin concerto. The author of the research considers the composer’s combination of the patterns of the academic genre and the intonational and structural peculiarities of Jewish folklore as an attempt to comprehend his national identity. The intonation and thematic analysis of the concerto compared with the composer’s statements distilled from his personal letters allows concluding about the presence of a concealed program revealing the problem of the history of the Jewish people and national character and reflecting the peculiarities of comprehension of their national identity by the subethnic group of Russian Jews. Since the main characteristic of this subethnic group is the Russian language and Russian culture perceived through it, the author of the research focuses on the way the peculiarities of the Russian composing school manifest themselves in this piece of music based on the Jewish intonations and genres.