Evaluative patterns in the concluding components of expounding essays
From the perspectives of Rhetorical Structure Theory and APPRAISAL
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.22671Keywords:
expounding essays, concluding components, Rhetorical Structure Theory, APPRAISAL, English for academic purposesAbstract
Essays that have an expounding or explaining nature are a common type of text in many academic disciplines such as business. While their primary function is to explain the causes or consequences of a phenomenon, they also serve to illustrate the writer’s perspective. In other words, these essays persuade readers to recognise the writer’s arguments, often when they are summarised in the concluding sentence of a paragraph with a final commentary. To illustrate how reasoning and persuasion are undertaken in the concluding components of a paragraph, this paper investigates the expounding essays written by English-as-a-Second-Language associate degree business students in a Hong Kong self-financed tertiary institution. To understand how logical coherence facilitates the writer’s evaluative stance, the present study examines the text structure and its influence on evaluative language choice by combining two analytical frameworks, Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and APPRAISAL. The textual focus is the body paragraphs announcing and explaining the factors or effects of a business topic to reveal how a conclusion is reached with an evaluative insight. The findings will demonstrate the common rhetorical relations for reasoning, elaborating and conjoining arguments. The findings will also illustrate the two key RST relations, Evaluation and Interpretation, located at the end of the paragraph. These two relations exhibit differences in the choice of explicit and implicit ATTITUDE resources. This paper concludes with a brief discussion on the pedagogical implications for instructing student writers in the rhetorical strategies for writing concluding components of a paragraph with an evaluative punch, based on the writer’s intention to resonate with his or her assessment throughout the paragraph or to make an alternative personal judgement over the subject matter.
References
Cheung, L. M. E. (2021) Expressions of Modality Associate Degree Business Explanation Essay Conclusions: A Functional Linguistic Perspective. English Language Teaching 15(1): 92–105. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v15n1p92
Doolan, S. M. (2021) An exploratory analysis of source integration in post-secondary L1 and L2 source-based writing. English for Specific Purposes 62: 128–141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2021.01.003
Dreyfus, S., & Weekes, T. (in press) ‘Putting Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) & Sydney School Genre Pedagogy (SSGP) to work in a compulsory first year arts subject’. In D. Caldwell, J. R. Martin and J. Knox (eds.) Developing Theory: A Handbook in Appliable Linguistics and Semiotics. Bloomsbury Studies in Systemic Functional Linguistics. London: Bloomsbury.
Green, N. L. (2021) Some argumentative uses of the rhetorical figure of antithesis in environmental science policy articles. In Proceedings of CMNA’21: Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument, September 2–3, 2021, Online 1–7.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. (2014) Halliday’s introduction to functional grammar (4th ed.). London: Routledge.
Hood, S. (2009) Texturing interpersonal meanings in academic argument: Pulses and prosodies of value. In G. Forey, and G. Thompson (eds.) Text type and texture 216–233. London: Equinox.
Hood, S. (2010) Appraising research: Evaluation in academic writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hovy, E., & Maier, E. (1995) Parsimonious or profligate: How many and which discourse structure relations? Unpublished paper. Retrieved on 23 November 2023 from https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=f742ede4e79b453b2d504d4948067a8edc219540
Humphrey, S., & Hao, J. (2009) The Role of ‘Coupling’ in Biological Experimental Reports. Linguistics and the Human Sciences 5(2): 169–194. https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.v5i2.169
Hyland, K. (2014) Activity and evaluation: Reporting practices in academic writing. In J. Flowerdew (ed.) Academic discourse 125–140. London: Routledge.
Jeffery, J. V. (2011) Subjectivity, intentionality, and manufactured moves: Teachers’ perceptions of voice in the evaluation of secondary students’ writing. Research in the Teaching of English 46(1): 92–127.
Low, H. M., San, P. H., Petras, Y., & Mohamad, A. R. (2013) Novice Writers in Asian academia: Insights on writing issues. 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature 19(3): 47–60.
Mann, W. C., & Thompson, S. A. (1988) Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text-interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 8(3): 243–281. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.1.1988.8.3.243
Mann, W. C., & Taboada, M. (2021) Relation Definitions. Retrieved on 27 March 2022 from http://www.sfu.ca/rst/01intro/definitions.html
Mann, W. C., Matthiessen, C. M. I. M., & Thompson, S. A. (1992) Rhetorical structure theory and text analysis. In W. C. Mann and S. A. Thompson (eds.) Discourse description: Diverse linguistic analyses of a fund-raising text 39–78. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Martin, J. R. (1992) English text: System and structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Martin, J. R. (2010) Semantic variation: Modelling realisation, instantiation and individuation in social semiosis. In M. Bednarek and J. R. Martin (eds.) New discourse on language: Functional perspectives on multimodality, identity, and affiliation 1–34. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2008) Genre relations: Mapping culture. London: Equinox.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. (2005) The evaluation of language: Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Matthiessen, C. M. (2015) Register in the round: Registerial cartography. Functional Linguistics 2(1): 1–48. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40554-015-0015-8
Myskow, G., & Ono, M. (2018) A matter of facts: L2 writers’ use of evidence and evaluation in biographical essays. Journal of Second Language Writing 41: 55–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2018.08.002
O’Donnell, M. (2000) RSTTOOL 2.4-A markup tool for rhetorical structure theory. In INLG’2000 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Language Generation 253–256. Mitzpe Ramon, Israel: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Sanders, T., Spooren, W., & Noordman, L. (1993) Coherence relations in a cognitive theory of discourse representation, Cognitive Linguistics 4(2): 93–134. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogl.1993.4.2.93
Stede, M., Taboada, M., & Das, D. (2017) Annotation guidelines for rhetorical structure. Manuscript. University of Potsdam and Simon Fraser University.
Szenes, E. (2017) The linguistic construction of business reasoning: Towards a language-based model of decision-making in undergraduate business [Doctoral dissertation, University of Sydney]. Sydney Digital Theses (Open Access). http://hdl.handle.net/2123/16815
Szenes, E. (2021) The linguistic construction of business decisions: A systemic functional linguistic perspective. Language, Context and Text 3(2): 335–366. https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.20008.sze
Taboada, M., & Mann, W. C. (2006) Rhetorical structure theory: Looking back and moving ahead. Discourse studies 8(3): 423–459. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445606061881
Taboada, M. (2006) Discourse markers as signals (or not) of rhetorical relations. Journal of pragmatics 38(4): 567–592. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2005.09.010
Trnavac, R., & Taboada, M. (2012) The contribution of nonveridical rhetorical relations to evaluation in discourse. Language Sciences 34(3): 301–318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2011.10.005
Trnavac, R., Das, D., & Taboada, M. (2016) Discourse relations and evaluation. Corpora 11(2): 169–190. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2016.0091
Unsworth, L. (1995) How and why: Recontextualizing science explanations in school science books [Doctoral dissertation, University of Sydney]. Sydney Digital Theses (Open Access). http://hdl.handle.net/2123/9054
Unsworth, L. (2020) Intermodal relations, mass and presence in school science explanation genres. In M. Zappavigna and S. Dreyfus (eds.) Discourses of hope and reconciliation: JR Martin’s contributions to Systemic Functional Linguistics 131–152. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
White, P. R. R. (2012) Exploring the axiological workings of ‘reporter voice’ news stories–Attribution and attitudinal positioning. Discourse, Context and Media 1(2–3): 57–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2012.10.004
Wiley, M. (2000) The popularity of formulaic writing (and why we need to resist). The English Journal 90(1): 61–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/821733
Yuan, J., Lin, Q., & Lee, J. S. (2021) ‘Discourse Tree Structure and Dependency Distance in EFL Writing’, in Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT, SyntaxFest 2021), Sofia, Bulgaria, pp. 105–115.
