Background
The present thesis stands at the
interface of several converging developments in linguistics and language
teaching:
All of the above strands of
research have received further impetus from the ‘corpus revolution’ which has
been reshaping language science since at least the 1980s. It has enabled
linguists to go beyond intuition and pen-and-paper analysis, so that their
research can now bear comparison with that of hard-pure sciences such as
physics and chemistry.
This study attempted to
weave together the aforementioned strands of research with a view to describing
a particular type of conventionalized expression which was here termed the
‘multi-word’ or ‘second-level’ discourse marker. Second-level discourse markers
are fixed expressions or restricted collocations usually composed of two or
more printed words; typical examples are it is argued that, the same
goes for, strictly speaking or with this in mind. Although
ubiquitous in both academic and journalistic language, they have so far been
paid scant attention. This is the first large-scale contrastive study of such
expressions using natural language corpora.
Study Objective
The chief objective of
this thesis was for a functional taxonomy of second-level discourse markers and
for a contrastive analysis of their use in English, French and German academic
and journalistic text. By the term ‘contrastive analysis’ was here meant the
processes involved in identifying and recording multi-word units which assume
identical or similar functions in actual manifestations of English, French and
German language use. Put differently and in simpler terms, the type of
contrastive analysis undertaken in this study aimed to set up equivalent
categories of second-level markers and to describe the equivalence relations
obtaining between them. Since there were found to be more than twenty
categories of discourse markers each counting hundreds of members, the analysis
was restricted to four major categories: exemplifiers, reformulators, inferrers
and restrictors.
Methodology
The present thesis locates itself
within the British tradition of text analysis established by Firth. It took as
its object of study actual occurrences of language rather than introspective
data. These occurrences were drawn from four different types of
computer-readable text archive in each language:
The
academic corpora were purpose-built from Internet sources and private
contributions; running into more than 30 million words, they are easily the
largest and most diverse electronic archives of academic language ever created,
including substantial quantities of text from various subject fields and
genres. The size and diversity of these corpora lends additional authority to
the statements based on them.
The academic corpora
were searched using commercially available utility programs, such as Wordsmith
and Microconcord. The use of such software was impossible in the case of
the CD-ROM encyclopaedias. Thus the Encyclopaedia
Britannica had to be searched using the Netscape
Navigator, and the French and German reference works cited above also came
with their own restricted search facilities.
Unlike the bulk of
recent corpus-based scholarship, this study could not rely exclusively on
computer-driven analysis. This is because the above-mentioned retrieval
software is still limited in its ability to extract complex, variable sequences
of words, with the result that it was impossible to identify all the instances,
including all the permutations, of a particular marker (e.g. it is to be
noted, it must be noted, it will be noted, it is notable,
it is noticeable, it is worth noting, etc.). Therefore an
ocular-scan based inventory was established and its content categorized using
Mann and Thompson’s (1988) rhetorical structure theory and common-sense
criteria; this inventory was based on an extensive list of multi-word markers
compiled by the author during the six years of his studies and beyond. Next the
computer corpora were tapped to check the categories thus developed against a
larger amount of data. This kind of investigation then provided feedback which
necessitated a rethinking of categories, additions to the inventory, and so on,
in an iterative cycle.
Once a categorized,
corpus-informed list had been drawn up, the investigation could proceed on a
quantitative basis, enabling the analyst to assign frequencies to various
tokens of markers and to approximate to citation forms of discourse markers to
be used in dictionaries and teaching materials. Frequency data based on the
parallel academic corpora allowed a ranking of categorized markers by frequency
of use as well as a cross-language comparison of the overall frequency of some
marker types.
Definition and Description of
Multi-word Markers
A review of the linguistic
literature showed two fields of research to be of prime importance to the
definition of multi-word discourse markers: pragmatics and lexicology. Research
in pragmatics has so far focussed on the functions of oral discourse markers;
this has led to the erroneous assumption that discourse markers are short items
carrying pragmatic meaning which are primarily found in the spoken language.
The present study refuted such claims, demonstrating that the term ‘discourse
marker’ can be applied to natural-language strings of varying length which
carry pragmatic and/or propositional meaning and occur in both speech and
writing. Just like the well-researched oral discourse markers, multi-word
markers were found to serve as signalling devices which indicate the coherence
relations obtaining between a particular unit of discourse and other,
surrounding units and/or aspects of the communicative situation. They thus
serve to facilitate the listener’s or reader’s task of comprehending the
discourse.
On the lexicographic
side, the focus of attention has been on issues of phraseological fixity.
Recent research in the Firthian tradition argues that the boundary between
compositional, or non-idiomatic, and non-compositional, or idiomatic, word
sequences is more fluid than traditionally assumed. There is now overwhelming
evidence on the frequency of word sequences showing that the primary division
between collocations and non-collocations is a matter of more or less rather
than yes or no. For example, depending on the size and content of the corpus
used, a word sequence such as book + proclaim may be viewed
either as a free combination or a collocation. Research has also suggested that
the notion of collocation itself must be widened to include more than
combinations of two words (e.g. not + wildly + original, not
+ forget + in a hurry). Accordingly, this study applied Howarth’s
(1996) three-level classification of two-item collocations to multi-word
discourse markers, which were defined as collocations of varying degrees of
restrictedness or as fixed expressions.
It then turned out that
the pragmatic and lexicological criteria just discussed were not sufficient to
account for some items intuited to be equivalent to multi-word markers, such as
English worse or French pire. To arrive at a fully satisfactory
definition, it was necessary to have recourse to the additional criterion of
probability of occurrence, or ‘frequency level’. It was found that typical
‘one-word’ or ‘first-level’ markers, at upwards of 150 tokens in 10 million
words, occur with significantly higher frequency than typical ‘multi-word’ or
‘second-level’ markers, at between 3 to 50 tokens in 10 million words.
With this in mind, the
term ‘second-level discourse marker’ was defined as follows:
‘Second-level discourse
markers are medium-frequency fixed expressions or restricted collocations
composed of two or more printed words acting as a single unit. Their function
is to facilitate the process of interpreting coherence relation(s) between
elements, sequences or text segments and/or aspects of the communicative
situation.’
On the basis of this definition,
the great variety of syntactic realizations of second-level markers were then
described. In so doing, three major categories (set expressions, sentence
fragments and sentence-integrated markers) were distinguished, which in turn
were divided into a number of subcategories. These subcategories turned out to
be somewhat different for each of the languages involved. It was then shown
that interlingual equivalence cannot be established on the basis of structural
similarity, so that a functional taxonomy became necessary.
A Functional Taxonomy
The rationale for a functional
taxonomy was that correspondences between source and target-language markers
can only be inferred from functional similarities in their contextual uses. Two
points in particular militate in favour of the taxonomy established in this
study: firstly, the detailed textual evidence compiled both manually and by
computer allowed a higher degree of descriptive delicacy than could have been
achieved in earlier work based on unaided intuition or a slim research base.
Thus, while all the relations encoded by markers classified in the taxonomy
could be described in terms of RST, usually such description turned out to be
far more coarsely grained than the functional taxonomy here proposed. The
elaboration relation, for example, was found to be encoded by announcers, topic
initiators, digression markers and clarification markers. Secondly, the
taxonomy derived additional authority from being multilingual, whereas previous
research had tended to be monolingual, mainly focussing on British and American
English.
The taxonomy comprises
22 categories of second-level markers, the names of which are meant to be
self-explanatory:
·
comparison and contrast markers
·
concession markers
·
exemplifiers
·
explainers
·
definers
·
enumerators
·
summarizers and concluders
·
inferrers
·
cause and reason markers
·
announcers
·
topic initiators
·
excluders
·
digression markers
·
question and answer markers
·
emphasizers
·
informers
·
clarification markers
·
suggestors
·
hypothesis and model markers
·
restrictors
·
referrers and attributors
·
reformulators and resumers
A few points of interest
emerged from this taxonomy. One was that the boundaries between some types of
second-level marker are quite fluid, so that some items may be said to have
dual or even triple category membership; this is obvious with such items as le
parallèle s’arrête là or da hören die Gemeinsamkeiten auf, which
function simultaneously as enumerators, contrast markers and concluders (or
initiators). The second point was that some some second-level markers are
functionally and semantically close to first-level markers (e.g. a
complication is that and however), whereas others, such as it is
often said that bear no such resemblance. A third point which emerged was
the existence of lexical dependencies between second-level markers which
sometimes operate over some considerable distance. The kinds of collocational
pattern involved here, such as with this in mind + let us turn to
or turning to + we find that, had so far gone completely
unnoticed. They necessitated a radical widening of the idiom principle
(Sinclair 1991) to accommodate ‘collocational combinations’ and ‘long-distance
collocations’.
Marker Equivalence
Two chapters of Part I of this
study were devoted to interlingual equivalence. Chapter 4 attempted to show how
general features of written language impact on the setting up of interlingual
equivalence between second-level markers; Chapter 5 looked at interlingual
correspondences between four of the 22 categories discussed above.
It was
demonstrated that syntactic differences between English, French and German
second-level markers can be accounted for in terms of five general theses, four
of which were first put forward by Blumenthal (1987). They concern divergences
in verb valency, in the order of information in the clause, in the degree of
specificity of expression, in the degree of activity inherent in the clause and
in syntactic progression at clause and sentence level. Related to this is the
thematic status of second-level markers as staging devices; it was found that
they ease the reader’s text processing by shifting the informational focus onto
subsequent elements, and by marking a change in thematic choice.
The subsequent analysis
of the literature on cross-cultural difference in writing styles revealed that
opinion among contrastivists is divided as to the frequency of marker use in
different languages and its implications for clarity of style. In this respect
a major shortcoming of previous studies was found to lie in the neglect of
second-level markers.
This shortcoming was to
be addressed in Chapter 5, where empirical evidence was adduced showing that
French second-level markers outnumber those available in English and German.
Not only were French writers found to show particular partiality for
second-level markers, but they also exhibited greater stylistic variability and
elegance, often replacing an object complement clause by an object noun phrase,
as with on voit que NP est important -> on voit l’importance de NP.
Beyond this, the
analysis yielded a rich harvest of interlingual equivalents between the four
categories under discussion, most of which had so far gone unrecorded, and
provided a finely grained analysis of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic
properties of second-level markers which impact on translational equivalence.
It was shown that interlingual differences may sometimes be very wide, as when
there is an equivalence relationship between first-level and second-level
markers. One example among many is the translation of French cela dit by German allerdings. An even more striking instance was afforded by such
French restaters as disons-nous,
which give rise to quite distinct linguistic environments difficult to imitate
in English and German.
At other times the
differences were found to be fairly small, but they nevertheless gave rise to
serious translation problems. This was illustrated with SLDMs formed from nouns
such as example, exemple and Beispiel,
which showed extremely subtle divergences in their collocational patterns. Even
where the languages under investigation offered clear similarities,
straightforward equivalences were sometimes found to be barred for reasons of
frequency. The zero connector is a case in point. For some types of
reformulation zero usage was shown to be more frequent than the use of a
marker.
From a lexicological
point of view, there was ample evidence of collocational phenomena which have
not yet received their fair share of attention from linguists. It was shown,
for example, that adverbial markers such as voire and carrément
may exhibit a statistically significant frequency of co-occurrence.
It has been noted by
several authors that some first-level markers put in place either paradigmatic
relationships which make two successive sentences the evocation of a whole and
of one of its elements or syntagmatic relationships that make one sentence the
background of another (MacNamara 1995, Blumenthal 1980). The same method of
categorization was found to have applicability to the SLDMs discussed here:
while exemplifiers mark a paradigmatic relationship, reformulators, inferrers
and restrictors mark a syntagmatic relationship.
Another fact of general
intralingual as well as interlingual importance concerns correspondences
between nominal and verbal SLDMs such as the
implication is that and this implies
that. These equivalences were first noted by Gallagher (1992). It should be
borne in mind, however, that they are far from perfect, as seen with this suggests that and the suggestion is that, where the former
comes within the province of inferrers while the latter is a suggestor. A
relatively significant tendency emerging from our analysis is that English and
especially French build up a large number of SLDMs using lexically variable
nominal patterns, where German exhibits a partiality for relatively fixed
verbal structures. A clear example is provided by restrictors introducing an
adverse point such as a complication is
that vs. erschwerend kommt hinzu,
dass. This divergence is a result of the more general differences in
information structuring between the two languages discussed in Chapter 4. Such
findings appear to contradict the widely held view that German is generally
more nominal in style than English.
A final point to be
noted is the implicit assumption in much of the literature (e.g. Grote, Lenke
and Stede 1997, Fraser 1998) that a typical sentence will contain just one
discourse marker cuing only one relation. The reality was found to be different
from this: firstly, one-word and second-level markers may occur in one
sentence; secondly, two discourse markers both from the same category (that said and however) and from different categories (c’est-à-dire and finalement)
may be used together; thirdly, as already mentioned, some such co-occurrences
form strong collocations: with this in
mind + let us revisit, voire +
franchement/carrément, c’est-à-dire +
en l’occurrence, to name but a few.
Following is a more
detailed overview of the results for the four types of second-level marker
which were subjected to detailed analysis:
Exemplifiers
English, French and German were
found to use semantically and pragmatically similar sets of exemplifiers. These
have so far been perceived as free combinations, but were here shown to be fairly
rigid collocations which exhibit only a small degree of variation. Generalizing
across all groups, such variation appears to be somewhat higher in French and
in German than in English. Close analysis of exemplificatory infinitive clauses
suggested that the large degree of variation found among German items may
result from a general German tendency to ad-hoc formulation which stands in
marked contrast with English and French reliance on stock phrases.
Further, frequency data
obtained from the parallel corpora showed that French exemplifiers occur with
considerably higher frequency than English or German items. There is thus
empirical support for the hitherto unfounded claim that, on average, French
writers make more extensive use of connectors than their English or German
counterparts. The frequency counts also illustrated a principle familiar from
other areas of corpus-driven lexicography: just as the commonest meanings of
words have been shown to be many times more frequent than their next commonest meanings
(Sinclair 1991), so too some standard realizations of SLDMs have a far higher
likelihood of occurrence than other items. Finally, some evidence was found of
a correlation between length of SLDM types and frequency of occurrence,
although less so in German than in English and French.
The translation problems
posed by exemplifiers are usually easy to solve, with the exception of
collocational gaps: a noun-verb collocation such as exemple + donner, which
cannot be translated literally when it encodes a relational process, may turn
out to be a pitfall even for the experienced translator. The same holds true
for noun-adjective collocations such as exemple
+ criant.
Reformulators
Reformulators were divided into
four subcategories: pure reformulators, gradational reformulators, repetitional
reformulators and reformulatory stance markers.
Two basic modes of
reformulation were distinguished, viz. the intensional and the extensional,
which in turn gave rise to more subtle distinctions. A browsing of the monolingual
corpora showed that the pure reformulators that is, c’est-à-dire
and das heißt all have the full range of intensional and extensional
modes, which suggests a great degree of translational equivalence. This finding
was confirmed and further refined through an inspection of the English and
French sections of the multilingual translation corpus, which showed the zero
connector to be another important choice in rendering that is. This
choice was particularly frequent when that is occurred in an extensional
mode close in meaning to namely or when it introduced intensional
definitions. In the other translation direction c’est-à-dire was
commonly rendered by zero when it occurred in bracketed or dashed glosses.
The pure reformulators
in other words, en d’autres termes and mit anderen Worten all
occur in the intensional mode; this mode therefore poses few translation
problems. However, in other words also has an
extensional/quantificational mode not paralleled by its French and German
equivalents. In this mode it is normally rendered by soit.
Generally speaking,
there were found to be perfect equivalents between pure reformulators of the
type also called, most of which have so far escaped scholarly notice: then
called – alors appelé, previously known as – anciennement
nommé, locally called – appelé localement, etc. However, the
apparent simplicity of such pairings tends to conceal many subtleties of usage.
Thus, désormais appelé translates either as henceforth or as thereafter
called, depending on context, and variously called finds only a
partial equivalent in diversement nommé.
The combination of
monolingual and multilingual approaches showed that French possesses a more
subtly differentiated set of pure reformulators, with a large number of
different items serving functions performed by a smaller number of English
equivalents.
As for gradational
reformulators, we found that not to say, pour ne pas dire and um
nicht zu sagen are exact semantic and syntactic equivalents, whereas things
are more complex with if not, voire, ja and similar
markers. For example, if not cannot be placed in front of prepositional
phrases without changing its meaning, so that or even, or indeed
and if not indeed must be used as translation equivalents; voire
can introduce combinations of verb and noun phrases, a feature which German can
only replicate through changes in word order. We also noted interesting
collocational features of gradational reformulators which complexify
equivalence relations. Thus, voire was found to collocate with simplement,
carrément, franchement and tout court.
Our analysis of
repetitional reformulators revealed an intriguing lexical gap: French restaters
of the type disons-nous were found to have no immediate equivalent in
either English or German. Recapitulors of the type comme on l’a déjà noté
were shown to be syntactically rather than semantically difficult to handle, as
the rules governing their position are not identical in all three languages.
Reformulatory stance
markers such as strictly speaking were found to be so numerous that they
would deserve book-length treatment in their own right. There appeared to be
certain functional assymetries across the languages under survey; thus, French
markers of the type pour le dire vite have no direct equivalent in English
or German. In these languages the metaphorization of approximation as lack of
speaking time is uncommon; a more common metaphor is simplification, as in simply
put or vergröbernd gesprochen.
Inferrers
Our
distinction between three types of inferrers yielded the following results:
·
Most inferrers based on verba
dicendi display total or partial equivalence with at least one item in the
other languages (e.g. this is not to say that -> cela n’est pas
pour dire que) Sometimes such equivalence may, for all practical purposes,
be total while at the same time being subject to usage and frequency
restrictions. The English inferrer this is not to say that, for
instance, rarely collocates with an adversative first-level marker, whereas
French and German markers with a similar function do so in at least fifty per
cent of cases. Thus, syntagmas such as ce n’est pas dire cependant que
should normally be rendered by a mere this is not to say that.
·
Suggestive inferrers provide
an assessment of a situation as obvious or introduce an important fact directly
inferrable from the previous discourse. Correspondences between languages are
fairly easy to establish, although subject to differences in verb valency (es
überrascht also nicht, dass vs. il n’est donc pas surprenant que [*il
ne surprend pas que]) and adjective choice (il est donc normal que
-> es ist somit einsichtig, dass).
·
The closest similarities
between languages were found to exist among two-element inferrers. Two-element
inferrers were so called because they consist of a verb or adjective phrase
indicating inference or certainty and a noun phrase referring back to the
previous discourse (e.g. it is concluded from this research that).
Although French two-element inferrers display greater transformation potential
than their English and German counterparts, allowing also the verbal or
adjectival element to be left implicit (d’après ce qui précède),
equivalence relations can be established on the basis of categorization into
five types. A minor complication is that some subtypes occur with differing
frequencies in the languages under investigation.
Restrictors
There is a bewildering variety of different types of restrictors. Five
of these were subjected to close scrutiny, with the following results:
English and French restrictors with topic shift and
inferential functions are closely similar in function. All the uses of cela
dit, for example, closely parallel those of that is, with the
exception of the mode in which cela dit is followed by a si
d’opposition. Variants of cela dit, such as ce point acquis, can
be translated using with this in mind or one of its nominal variants,
although English and French differ somewhat with regard to the nouns occurring
within this pattern. German, on the other hand, prefers adversative one-word
connectors such as allerdings, dennoch or freilich or the
zero connector to mark restrictive topic shifts and inferences.
In English and French most restrictors introducing an
adverse point are built around an abstract head noun occurring either in
prepositional phrases (with the added complication that) or as subjects
of clauses (one problem is that). German, while also offering a fair
number of such constructions (mit dem Unterschied, dass), appears to
favour verbal constructions (erschwerend kommt hinzu, dass; einschränkend
ist zu sagen, dass). There is a one-to-many relationship between German
restrictors such as erschwerend kommt hinzu, dass on the one hand and
their English and French equivalents (e.g. a further complication is that,
to further confound the picture; pour compliquer le tout, plus
gravement encore) on the other; such correspondences further vindicate one
of the general translation principles posited in this thesis, whereby the
clause-internal informational order needs to be redistributed in English-German
and English-French translation. There are also complex phraseological
constraints on the set of nouns which go to make up the nominal restrictors in
question. Thus, while it is possible to say the caveat/constraint is that
in English, we cannot say *la réserve est que in French, and so on.
Another translation problem is that there are wide
interlingual differences in the range and distribution of nouns occurring in
prepositional phrases or as subjects of clauses. Thus, for example, English and
German have no direct equivalent for French avec cette parenthèse que.
In such cases one of the other noun structures available in English and German
usually fills the bill; avec la parenthèse que, for example, can usually
be rendered by with the exception that and mit der Ausnahme, dass
without any serious loss of semantic information.
Restrictors expressing a degree of uncertainty are
superficially similar, albeit found with differing frequencies. The English
restrictor in the current state of our knowledge, for example, which is
directly equivalent to French en l’état actuel de nos connaissances and
German nach dem gegenwärtigen Erkenntnisstand, was found to be notably
uncommon.
Similar remarks hold true for restrictors expressing doubt.
It is their very similarity across languages which may cause translation
problems. Thus, the English restrictor NP + should be viewed with
some reservations translates into French as NP + est à considérer
avec prudence or as NP + appelle des réserves.
Marker Use in Non-native English
It is no great exaggeration to say
that second-level markers have so far completely escaped the attention of
teachers and language pedagogues alike. This is just one aspect of the still
fashionable neglect of language form in ‘communicative’ and ‘neo-communicative’
language teaching. This neglect became evident from the critical analysis
undertaken in Part II of advanced English-language writing by German academics
and students as well as of a small number of published translations by
professional translators. The major finding was that, in both quantitative and
qualitative terms, second-level marker use by advanced German writers of
English compares unfavourably with that of natives.
Quantitatively speaking,
there emerged a fairly consistent pattern of over- and under-use in the texts
by German natives. Frequency counts indicated that their writing is heavily
skewed in favour of lexicalized first-level markers. In particular, it appeared
that the wide variety of syntactically integrated markers in native academic
prose (e.g. an example is provided by)
is replaced by a limited number of short, non-integrated devices (e.g. for example) in non-native writing.
Where German writers of English do resort to second-level markers, they tend to
use the commonest of these with much greater frequency than natives and to
fight shy of structures which lack a ‘direct’ equivalent in their mother
tongue. Yet it was also observed that they are much less inclined to over-use
sentence fragments followed by a that-clause
than their French counterparts, and that there seems to be a correlation
between the adequate use of SLDMs by non-natives and their coverage in
dictionaries or textbooks.
Qualitatively speaking,
the analysis revealed a number of recurrent error types across different
categories of second-level markers. Many of these errors concerned complex
points of usage, such as semantic prosody and verb valency. The reasons for
such errors are not entirely clear. It is a reasonable assumption that most
non-native professionals, although very advanced learners by most standards,
continue to base their writing around a number of lexical and rhetorical ‘teddy
bears’ (Hasselgreen 1994) manifesting themselves as preferred (i.e. overused)
lexical choices and rhetorical strategies. There is a strong case for believing
that such fixed points are remnants of misinformed instruction and/or teaching
materials relying on tightly circumscribed sets of one-for-one correspondences
between languages. By contrast, L1 writers use a broad repertoire of rhetorical
strategies, and these rhetorical choices in turn determine the use of a wider
range of lexis.
Evidence from published
translations completed this picture. Translators were shown to succumb to
source-language interference in translating second-level markers. Two reasons
may account for this: firstly, translators working into their mother tongue may
find it difficult to recognize source-language markers and hence to memorize
them; in other words, they cannot tell a second-level marker from a free
combination of words and therefore treat it in terms of general
lexico-grammatical rules. Secondly, there are practically no teaching materials
on second-level markers, and they are rarely discussed in foreign language and
translation classrooms.
Lexicographic Remedies
An analysis of a number of
unabridged dictionaries and vocabulary books revealed that both monolingual and
bilingual lexicography are still a long way from giving second-level markers
adequate treatment. The general neglect of these markers by lexicographers and
teachers, as well as the underuse of these items by non-native speakers, made
it necessary to discuss issues related to their inclusion in dictionaries.
Among these issues were: factors governing the selection of second-level
markers; organizing principles and entry structures; the provision of
metalinguistic information; exemplification.
It was suggested that
selection be based on a large inventory of the lexical class under
consideration. The computer corpus can then be queried to determine the
frequency of each inventoried item, and it can be decided which items to
include in the dictionary by defining an arbitrary frequency threshold.
As for the positioning
of second-level markers, it was concluded from a review of the phraseological
literature that there should be neither consistent conflation into
end-of-article nests nor arbitrary allocation to a particular sense division.
Rather, a middle course should be steered between considerations of semantic
relatedness, user convenience, and economy of treatment.
As regards
metalinguistic information, the minimum requirement for coverage of
second-level markers was found to be the provision of explicit guidance on
syntactic variation, textual function and collocational patterning. Ideally,
all the usual types of metalinguistic information should be supplied, with the
one exception that phonetic information can usually be dispensed with. Learner
dictionaries could additionally benefit from the inclusion of warnings against
typical errors gleaned from corpus-based studies such as that undertaken in
this study.
Examples of second-level
marker use should preferably be authentic; slight editing may be permissible to
remove or replace words and phrases that may cause difficulty for the
non-native. Since the sometimes numerous functions of discourse markers cannot
easily be illustrated within the limited compass of a paper dictionary, the
ideal place for them is the electronic dictionary, which apart from being
cheaper to produce and update, offers easier and faster access.
These suggestions for
lexicographic treatment were then illustrated by means of sample entries for
various types of dictionaries.
Second-level Markers and
Composition Teaching
This study has provided further
evidence for the importance of phraseology to native-like target-language
performance. Indeed, the imitative use of phraseology is the foundation upon
which effective processing and communication on the one hand, and creative expression
on the other are grounded: the mature native’s command of fixed expressions and
collocations facilitates text production through savings in processing time and
the quasi-automatic provision of textual bulk, while at the same time enhancing
the reader’s chances of interpreting the text; conversely, the lower density of
familiar phraseology in an L2 writer’s text found in this study is likely to
have an adverse effect on naturalness and on reader comprehension.
This comparatively
simple realization, it was argued, has long been obscured by the inordinate
weight given within communicative language teaching to ‘message focus’ rather
than ‘form focus’, and this is where one of the major deficiencies of much
composition teaching seems to lie. Under the process-oriented paradigm,
students have been encouraged to hone strategic skills such as ‘prewriting’,
‘drafting’ and ‘revision’ without paying serious attention to textual building
blocks or language tout court. The result is that, despite non-natives’
mastery of general writing strategies, which usually transfer positively to the
L2, even very advanced non-native writers continue to flout lexico-grammatical
and discursive norms.
It was suggested that
one way of tackling this problem might be to raise student awareness of
first-level and second-level markers on the one hand, and of the tight
interplay between long-distance collocations formed by discourse markers and
‘standard’ rhetorical patterns on the other. A number of proposals were then
made for classroom interaction and exercises.