Multifunctionality in English

Corpora, Language and Academic Literacy Pedagogy

Zihan Yin, Elaine Vine, Zihan Yin, Elaine Vine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000542301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This edited volume provides detailed analyses of multifunctional forms in English and offers hands-on approaches exemplifying relevant implications and useful applications to language and literacy educators in TESOL, ESL/EFL/EAL and research students in applied linguistics and education.

The chapters cover: The multifunctionality of utterances in spoken and multimodal corpora, the multifunctionality of linguistic creativity in different genres, multifunctional pronouns in hard and soft sciences, and professional discourse in the university and secondary school contexts. The volume also offers a comparison of the multifunctionality of verbs between ESL textbooks, native written and spoken English corpora, and between ESL and L1 university students in writing a particular genre; comparisons of the multifunctionality of discourse markers between different registers and between L1 and L2 English speakers, as well as multifunctional metadiscourse markers in different disciplines and paradigms.

With detailed analysis of authentic corpus data representing different varieties of English, specialized use in different contexts and disciplines, and practical teaching and learning applications, the volume bridges theory and practice, providing a creatively designed resource for students, educators and researchers looking to understand multifunctional forms in English.

1 Multifunctionality, language and literacy

Zihan Yin and Elaine Vine

DOI: 10.4324/9781003155072-1

Introduction

The development of corpora and corpus linguistics has opened a new door for our understanding of language in use in specific contexts (e.g. Biber et al., 1999). By analyzing language features – such as frequency, forms, meanings and positions in different registers, genres and disciplines – using corpus data and tools, applied linguists have provided useful reference resources for language and literacy educators and learners (e.g. Hyland, 2004). Corpus-based searches of language units (e.g. single words and multi-word units) in either general corpora (e.g. British National Corpus) or specialized corpora (e.g. Textbook English Corpus, Le Foll, forthcoming) allow us to view patterns of language in use in different contexts.

However, for analyses such as analyzing pragmatic meanings and functions which involve the interpretation of meanings and functions in specific contexts, corpus tools tend not to adequately capture and distinguish them (Vine, 2011; Yin, 2016). However, certain English language units, for example words and phrases (e.g. and, well, so, like, be able to) and utterances in spoken English, are known for their multifunctionality in terms of grammatical and/or pragmatic functions and discourse acts (e.g. Fox Tree & Schrock, 2002; Gaines, 2011). The differences could be accounted for by context, register and discipline variations. Capturing such differences needs careful manual analysis of concordance lines or whole texts. Unfortunately, compared with the prevailing automatic searches of English word forms in different registers and disciplines in corpus studies, detailed analysis of multifunctionality in English, which tends to be more labour-intensive, is scarce. Understanding multifunctionality in English, deemed to equip students and professionals with effective communication skills such as conveying meanings appropriately (e.g. pragmatics) and precisely (e.g. discipline-specific meanings), should form part of language and literacy education curricula. Therefore, this book presents a collection of studies on multifunctionality in English in terms of context, register and discipline variations, together with pedagogical implications and applications of the studies.

Previous research on multifunctionality

Studies on multifunctionality to date have focused on high-frequency discourse markers such as so, okay, well, you know in spoken English, mainly in conversation (e.g. Bolden, 2009; Buysse, 2012; Cuenca, 2008; Gaines, 2011; Haselow, 2011; Tagliamonte, 2005; Müller, 2004; Park, 2010; Miller & Weinert, 1995). Most of these articles have been published in the Journal of Pragmatics, with limited discussion, if any, on the implications and applications for language and literacy education. By contrast, the article by Yin (2019), published in TESOLANZ Journal, reported the multi-functions of so in different registers and social settings and discussed pedagogical implications and applications of the multifunctionality of so.

Books on related themes have focused on analyzing multifunctional words and phrases using corpora data (e.g. Aijmer, 2013) or introduced and/or showcased the applications of the methodology of corpus linguistics in pragmatics (e.g. Rühlemann, 2019; Aijmer & Rühlemann, 2014). Aijmer (2013) for example provides an overview account of the definition of pragmatic markers, linguistic theories related with the contextual usage and their formal and functional features, and promotes a nuanced understanding of well, in fact and actually and general extenders (e.g. clause-final and—, clause-final or—) by analyzing the usage patterns (e.g. position, prosodic factor and collocation) and pragmatic functions in a wide range of spoken contexts (e.g. business transactions, classroom lessons and public dialogue). Rühlemann (2019) on the other hand introduces how corpus linguistics as a methodology can be applied in analyzing pragmatic topics including speech acts, deixis, pragmatic markers, evaluation, conversational structure and multimodality. Each chapter discusses theories related with accounted topics and showcases corpus-based analysis of a focus case (e.g. corpus research on the speech act of why don’t you in Chapter 1 and backchannels in storytelling sequences in Chapter 6). Aijmer and Rühlemann (2014) provide a collection of research studies by leading scholars in the rapidly growing area of corpus pragmatics. They cover key corpus-pragmatic topics including pragmatic principles, pragmatic markers, evaluation, reference, speech acts and conversational organization.

The current edited volume focuses on multifunctional language units in English, combining corpus linguistics, pragmatics, register/disciplinary variations, and language and academic literacy education. Most corpus linguistics related publications target teaching English as a second/foreign language or EAP/ESP context, and only limited discussion is available for the potential interface between corpus linguistics and literacy education. Literacy is, however, an integral part of the curriculum of education as a discipline, and academic literacies are essential skills that English-medium students need to acquire hand-in-hand with subject content. Therefore, this book establishes the synergy between corpus linguistics – a powerful methodology, multifunctional forms an insufficiently analyzed linguistic phenomenon – and English language and academic literacy pedagogy, topics of interest to a wide range of audiences. This book includes both chapters discussing English language pedagogical implications/applications and chapters of implications/applications for literacy education.

Language and literacy

What do we mean then by referring to the concept of language and literacy in this collection? By language, we mean the English language; the findings in this volume could inform but are not limited to ESL/EFL/EAL learners and educators. Students enrolled in English-medium schools and universities, and professionals using English as the working language (e.g. school teachers), could also find the discussion in particular chapters in this volume of value and relevance, as they all need to develop literacy skills, either academic or professional.

Literacy is a well-known concept in the discipline of education; traditionally, it has been known as the ability to read and write, but with society developing and the concept evolving, now pre-service primary and secondary teachers are trained to teach a wider range of literacy skills: reading, writing, speaking, listening, critical literacies, multimodal literacies, information literacies, digital literacies, etc. In addition, in the university context, students, domestic and international, are expected to develop and apply academic literacy skills such as critical reading skills, academic presentation skills, genre knowledge (e.g. essay/report structure), discipline-specific writing skills (e.g. evaluative stance in disciplines) and research writing skills (e.g. thesis writing, writing for publication). Academic literacy educators are practitioners who work in writing centres (as in the United States) or academic literacy centres or support units (as in universities in the UK, Australia and New Zealand).

Chapters in this volume might not, within the same chapter, discuss pedagogical implications/applications for both EFL/ESL/EAL teaching and academic literacy. When the data and findings are relevant and appropriate, pedagogical implications/applications for either EFL/ESL/EAL teaching or academic literacy teaching or both are discussed.

The edited collection

This edited collection covers a wide range of topics on multifunctionality in English, from utterances in interactive discourse and linguistic creativity to metadiscourse, verbs and discourse markers. The contributors include 21 authors from 15 universities in ten different countries: the Netherlands, Canada, Singapore, China, Malaysia, New Zealand, Germany, Ireland, the United States and Australia. To date, the literature on multifunctionality has focused on English word forms, in particular discourse markers, in spoken English. This volume broadens our understanding of multifunctional forms in English: (1) it examines multifunctionality beyond vocabulary level (e.g. single word, multi-word units) such as utterances and linguistic creativity; (2) it investigates multifunctionality in a wider range of domains such as replies/responses, published journal articles, learner corpora, academic lectures, secondary classroom discourse and textbooks; and (3) it draws on data from a range of English varieties such as British English, American English, South African English, Hong Kong English and New Zealand English.

The volume contains four sections: utterances and language play; metadiscourse in disciplines and professional discourse; verbs in disciplines and textbooks; and discourse markers in registers.

Part I brings an innovative approach to examining multifunctionality by investigating multifunctionality in utterances in interactive discourse and linguistic creativity in different genres. Harry Bunt (Chapter 2) analyzes the multifunctionality of utterances in interactive discourse using the DialogBank corpora, annotated according to the ISO 24617-2 annotation standard. He explores the reasons behind and the forms of multifunctionality in utterances, and the relative importance of multifunctional forms in interactive discourse. He demonstrates that utterances often have multiple communicative functions because of their syntactic complexity, the multidimensional nature of communication, and entailments and implicatures. He argues that the most intriguing forms are of a pragmatic nature, and knowledge of their existence, sources and manifestations is an essential part of the pragmatic competence of proficient language users.

Elena Afros (Chapter 3) examines the functions of linguistic creativity in two written academic genres, replies/responses and research articles, in language studies. She analyzes data from self-compiled corpora, consisting of 60 single-authored items in peer-reviewed academic journals. She explores the exponents and functions of linguistic creativity on the lexical and phrasal levels, and the impact of genre on the creative language choices in the two genres. She shows the two most frequent exponents of lexical and phrasal creativity in the present corpus are formality incongruities and idiom variants. She argues that the multifunctionality of linguistic creativity makes it an invaluable resource for academic writers and that an incorporation of the findings into EAP curricula would enhance students’ understanding of the role of linguistic creativity in academic genres and help them assess its appropriateness in their own writing. Finally, she provides an example of how to integrate a discussion of linguistic creativity into an EAP course.

Part II contains three chapters on multifunctionality of metadiscourse markers and personal pronouns in published journal articles and personal pronouns in academic lectures and secondary school lessons. Feng Cao and Guangwei Hu (Chapter 4) investigate the multifunctionality of interactional metadiscourse, focusing on hedges, boosters and self-mentions, in the post-method sections of 120 quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research articles in psychology and applied linguistics. Their analysis revealed both disciplinary and paradigmatic influences on the distribution of the multifunctional stance features of hedges, boosters and self-mentions. They conclude the chapter with implications for the teaching of multifunctional metadiscursive resources in EAP courses. They suggest, for example, that a writing instructor can make use of the findings of this study to raise novice writers’ awareness of how published writers use hedges skilfully to modify the accuracy and certainty of a statement, withhold full commitment from a knowledge claim or negotiate with readers by showing some humility.

Jingjie Li, Wenjie Hu and Huili Hou (Chapter 5) investigate the multifunctionality of the first-person pronoun we and its co-selection patterns in hard science journal articles. By analyzing 4,137 authentic instances, they found we occurs quite frequently in hard science articles, and that among all the four identified semantic references of we, self-reference we, author-reader we, discipline we and general we, the self-reference we accounts for the vast majority of all the semantic references of we. The high frequency of self-reference we implies that, in most cases although the use of we in hard science articles may appear to be “reader-oriented”, it actually expresses the writers’ point of view. This paper also offers advice on teaching we in hard...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Multifunctionality, language and literacy
• PART I Multifunctionality – Utterances and language play
• PART II Multifunctionality – Metadiscourse in disciplines and professional discourse
• PART III Multifunctionality – Verbs in disciplines and textbooks
• PART IV Multifunctionality – Discourse markers in registers
• Index