Interrogatives in English and Serbian academic discourse – a contrastive pragmatic approach

Title: Interrogatives in English and Serbian academic discourse – a contrastive pragmatic approach
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2012, vol. 38, iss. 2, pp. [17]-35
Extent
[17]-35
  • ISSN
    0524-6881 (print)
    1805-0867 (online)
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
 

Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.

Abstract(s)
The paper presents the results of a corpus-based contrastive study of interrogatives in written academic discourse in English and Serbian. Three corpora were analyzed (articles written by English and Serbian authors in their mother tongues, and by Serbian writers in English) in order to establish the distribution and functions of interrogatives, with the special emphasis on possible transferring of writing habits from the authors' native written culture to the Anglo-American one. The analyzed academic articles come from various social and hard sciences, in order both to establish cross-disciplinary variations and, more importantly, to depict some culture-based preferences in the use of interrogatives. Being rarely used as the request for information in academic articles, the interrogatives are viewed as indirect speech acts performing various interpersonal functions, such as drawing the readers' attention to a specific idea or result, announcing or giving comments on the proposition material, or establishing contact with the reader.
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