The semantic-pragmatic interface of authorial presence in academic lecturing phraseology

Abstract

Epistemic lexical verbs (Hyland, 1998) constitute essential elements in conveying different interpersonal meanings, among those judgment, certainty, doubt, and evidence, aiding speakers both to project themselves into the speech and to maintain interesting relationships with audiences. Supporting Sinclair’s (1991) contention that meanings are clustered into lexicogrammatical patternings, and not in isolated items, this paper explores the phraseology accompanying the most representative epistemic lexical verbs (ELVs) in university lectures. By applying corpus-based methodology, we also illustrate the functional variability of think –the most salient of these lexical verbs–, especially the roles it performs when hedging the discourse and complying with politeness conventions as part of interactional and metadiscoursal strategies. At a textual level, results indicate that lecturing speech favors the proliferation of evaluation markers that appear to be arranged in several recurrent formal patterns. This clearly entails potential for pedagogical purposes and ESP syllabuses.

Keywords

• academic speech
• lectures
• stance
• lexical units
• interpersonal pragmatics