This article investigates
-prefacing and its environments in student essays. Specifically, the focus is on those instances when a writer uses the Finnish
‘and’ as an opening element (“preface”) to ...the sentence. While
-prefacing is most commonly a single-usage feature employed by a small minority of writers in the essay genre analyzed here, the detailed functional-rhetorical analysis reveals a rich picture of these usages and the respective discourse norm that emerges and evolves in practice. This paper identifies eight micro-level discourse functions for
-prefacing in the essays: (i)
; (ii)
; (iii)
; (iv)
; (v)
; (vi)
; (vii)
; and (viii)
. Significantly,
-prefacing is not limited to the failed essays, nor to the low-graded essays more generally. The differences found in high- and low-graded (failed) essays may, however, suggest that some discourse functions and rhetorical patterns are associated with a higher institutional value than others. Methodologically, this study highlights the benefits of Rich Feature Analysis and dialogically oriented linguistic discourse analysis for exploring a relatively infrequent and yet distinctive rhetorical resource that has a complex form-function relationship in student essays.
Metadiscourse, broadly characterized as “discourse about discourse,” manifests itself in many written, spoken, and electronic genres. In line with the reflexive model of metadiscourse, the present ...article aims at a rich description of metadiscourse in its context. The article examines transition sentences (TS), a relevant discourse category in newspaper texts. The empirical analysis focuses on a metadiscursive device discovered in the Finnish data, the so-called dialogical passive (typically translated as Let's, Let me, or Why don't we). It is an instance of participant-oriented metadiscourse. Its discourse functions include topic management, source management, management of narrative time and place, initiating an illustration, and evaluative comments. Furthermore, the article explores constraints for metadiscourse. These constraints relate to the style of writing (e.g., genre), the layout and the discourse patterns of texts, professional issues (such as media profiles and writer profiles), and the narrative patterns and rhetoric.
I den här artikeln diskuteras följande frågor: Varför är det viktigt att språkvårdare känner till sociala medier och den praxis som råder där? Hur har de finska språkvårdarna vid Institutet för de ...inhemska språken dragit konkret nytta av sociala medier? Vilka möjligheter å ena sidan och begränsningar och hot å andra sidan innebär de sociala medierna för språkvården? Och på vilket sätt är de sociala medierna närvarande och relevanta också i den mest traditionella formen av språkvårdens tjänster, det vill säga i telefonrådgivningen? Med hjälp av sociala medier bygger språkvårdarna upp en ny slags relation till arbetet – till språkvården, det språk som vårdas och naturligtvis till språkbrukarna. Trots alla förändringar förblir kärnan i arbetet och det viktigaste målet ändå desamma.
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