Anna Mauranen Bücher

Academic writing is rhetorical and culturally conditioned. What in one culture appears as effective and proper, can in a new cultural context look like chaotic writing and sloppy thinking. To discover the ways in which such impressions are made, we need careful textual analysis of academic writing in different cultural contexts. This book takes a textlinguistic approach and contrasts academic journal articles in a large and dominant culture (Anglo-American), a small and peripheral one (Finnish), and the intercultural products of the small culture members writing in the dominant language (Finns in English). The results indicate that academics do have culture-specific writing styles, and that textlinguistic tools are crucial if we want to expand our understanding of written communication.

The book showcases findings from the ELFA project, which analyzes a corpus of one million words of spoken academic English utilized as a lingua franca. It explores the linguistic features, communication strategies, and the implications for teaching and learning in multilingual academic settings. The research highlights how English functions as a bridge among speakers of different native languages, providing valuable insights into academic discourse and intercultural communication.

Reflexive language - the capacity of language to speak about itself - is unique to human languages; yet little is known of its use in actual dialogue. Fundamental features of language are manifest in dialogic speech and in lingua francas. Both are taken on board in this book, which radically widens our conception of reflexivity in discourse. Reflexivity, or metadiscourse, is central to successful communication. It is also vital in understanding academic argumentation, essential to academic self-understanding, and at the same time it has wide applications.

People have a natural propensity to understand language text as a succession of smallish chunks, whether they are reading, writing, speaking or listening. Linguists have found that this propensity can shed light on the nature and structure of language, and there are many studies which attempt to harness the potential of natural chunking. This book explores the role of chunking in the description of discourse, especially spoken discourse. It appears that chunking offers a sound but flexible platform on which can be built a descriptive model which is more open and comprehensive than more familiar approaches to structural description. The model remains linear, in that it avoids hierarchies, and it concentrates on the combinatorial patterns of text. The linear approach turns out to have many advantages, bringing together under one descriptive method a wide variety of different styles of speech and writing. It is complementary to established grammars, but it raises pertinent questions about many of their assumptions.