The purpose of the present study is to analyse abstracts related to Applied Linguistics, and more precisely the discourse functions of grammatical subjects and verbs. The corpus consisted of 50 PhD thesis abstracts written on the subject of Applied Linguistics. All of the abstracts were written from 2010 to 2014. The theses from which the abstracts were extracted are available in the ProQuest d...

The use of evidential and epistemic marking as a rhetorical strategy has received little attention in the literature. Speakers often make judgments on the basis of perceptual, reported, or inferred evidence, thus the relationship between epistemicity and evidentiality is often close and difficult to demarcate. However, whereas epistemicity involves the speaker’s or writer’s evaluation, judgment...

This paper explores the possibilities and limits of a discourse grammar applied to spontaneous speech. Most discourse grammars (e.g. SDRT, Asher, 1993; RST, Mann & Thompson, 1988) tend to be descriptive theories of written discourse which presuppose a coherent structure. This structure is the outcome of a goal directed planning process on the part of the producer. In order to obtain a better un...