EXPRESSING LESSER RELEVANCE IN ACADEMIC CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
Vol.7, Issue 2, 2021, pp. 127-146 Full text
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.21.2.1
Web of Science: 000737013000001
Authors:
Diana Yankova https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4524-882X
Irena Vassileva https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0150-6375
Affiliation: New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria
Contributor roles
Conceptualization, Investigation, Validation: D.Y. (lead);
Supervision, Project Administration, Data Curation, Formal Analysis: I.V. (lead);
Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing: D.Y., I.V. (equal)
Abstract
While marking importance and relevance in academic discourse has been a widely researched topic, markers of lesser significance have so far been understudied. The article therefore focuses on some of the discoursal means of expressing lesser importance in conference presentations. The corpus of the study comprises recordings of 20 presentations in English at international linguistics conferences by speakers of various cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The approach follows Deroey and Taverniers's (2012) study of lecture discourse, whereby depending on the way lesser importance is expressed the markers are grouped under five categories. Their methodology is checked against the data provided by the transcriptions of the conference recordings to ascertain the extent to which it is applicable to other spoken academic genres. The ultimate objective is to provide steppingstones for interpreting information and distinguishing between what is important and relevant and less so in conference presentations as well as for identifying presenters' motivation for employing this type of metadiscourse.
Keywords: metadiscourse, lesser relevance markers, conference presentations
Article history:
Submitted: 20 June 2020
Reviewed: 11 August 2020
Accepted: 30 November 2021
Published: 30 December 2021
Citation (APA):
Yankova, D. & Vassileva, I. (2021). Expressing Lesser Relevance in Academic Conference Presentations. English Studies at NBU, 7(2), 127-146. https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.21.2.1
Copyright © 2021 Diana Yankova and Irena Vassileva
This open access article is published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. If you want to use the work commercially, you must first get the authors' permission.
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Handling Editor: Stan Bogdanov
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