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without any postmodification. Second, copular be constructions were found to be used with the of -constructions to carry out characterizing, identifying, and evaluative functions. Three important functions of the of -construction were identified. The first appears to be a hedging function by avoiding the use of an agent, which is referred to as agent demotion. The of -construction itself functions as the subject to avoid the use of an animate entity. Another function of the of -construction is encapsulation (Sinclair, 1993) by packaging information into a clausal element which plays a role in maintaining textual cohesion. Halliday and Martin (1993) also point out that this is an important function for academic writers to build new knowledge on top of the old, taken-for-granted ones. Lastly, the of -construction can be used to express evaluation in at least three ways. These include using the nominal group at N1 (e.g., problem, significance), premodifiers preceding N1 or N2 (e.g., important, impossible) and both (e.g., a thorny problem). In the next section, we would like to demonstrate how different types of semantic relations associated with the of -construction can be applied to the analysis of sections in a research article.
6.2 Application to Pedagogy
Given that we employ an academic corpus for the present study, our findings will be applicable to teachers and learners in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Unfortunately, unlike previous findings on lexical bundles or phraseological approach to academic writing where a list of the most frequently used of -constructions can be immediately used for teachers as material for curriculum design and for learners as a potential learning aid, the huge amount of possible combinations of the of -constructions seems to be underrepresented by any list of less than a hundred or so.
One solution to compensate for this difficulty of transforming research results into teachable materials was inspired by our covarying collexeme analysis results.
Observation of the CCA results reveals many discipline-specific pairs such as breach of contract and Court of Appeal. These pairs could not be adequately explored as they reflect disciplinary variations. For the benefit of teaching academic writing, a more
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specific approach could also be useful. Previous research also has shown the benefits of compiling a specialized corpus for teaching academic writing (e.g., Flowerdew, 2004, 2008; Tribble, 2002). The next section, Section 6.2.1, will present the use of a mini corpus constructed from the BNCweb to be applied to raising learner’s awareness of the of -construction. Section 6.2.2 will provide additional examples to serve as instructions to teaching agent demotion in academic writing.
6.2.1 A Mini Corpus of Nucleic Acid Research
While there are varying functions that are potentially possible with the of -construction, a pedagogical application by using specialized corpus data is presented here. The objective of this analysis is to see how of -constructions are distributed in various sections of empirical research articles. A mini corpus of ten research articles all of which come from the journal Nucleic Acid Research was selected from BNCweb involving a few steps from the main menu to select one of the user-specific functions to make a subcorpus. In this case, three text files (FTB, K5N, K5R) were selected for a query for the concordance lines containing an of -construction. After downloading the query results from the website, some manual work was necessary to identify the positions of the concordance lines within a research article. The selection criterion for a research article from the corpus was mainly based on its organization where five sections including abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussion were all present. Each section was recognized by its section heading. An additional section referred to as ‘others’, which contain all the captions for tables and figures was also included. The results generated 1,088 instances of of -constructions. However, only 139 of them has a frequency of more than 2. A covarying collexeme analysis was applied to identify their collocational strengths. A total of 82 collexeme pairs with a collocational strength greater than 2 were analyzed and classified into semantic relations. Table 6.1 presents the results of corpus examples in each section. For example, in the abstract section, there is only one collexeme pair, expression of the variants, that has a frequency of more than 2.
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Table 6.1 List of N1-N2 collexeme pairs generated from ten Nucleic Acid Research articles
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Table 6.1 – continued from previous page
Section N1 N2
In addition, we can find a highly disciplinary-specific of -constructions from the data shown in Table 6.1. With only one exception, lines of evidence in the discussion section, which is an expression of research discourse possibly used by academic writers across disciplines, the rest of the N1-N2 collexeme pairs are all discipline-specific involving technical nouns such as promoter, genes, mRNA,
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bacteriophage, exon, and polypeptide. However, a quick query for the of -construction lines of evidence from BNCweb generates 23 hits. The distribution function indicates that the use of this phrase is highly academic with a rate of 14 out 23. The remaining nine instances are found in books. The text domains where lines of evidence can be found are mainly scientific (21 out 23) and two instances found in arts and world affairs. In other words, lines of evidence is more of a scientific academic discourse than the humanities. As discussed earlier in Section 4.1, technical nouns prevail in N2.
N1, on the other hand, involves more action nominals such as analysis, preparation, detection, and attributive nouns such as presence, cooperativity, and mobility.
Table 6.1 also demonstrates variations among different sections. In terms of a quantitative comparison, the abstract section is least likely to find the of -construction as compared to other sections. This section only has one N1-N2 collexeme pair, that is, the expression of variants, which qualifies our criteria for collocational strength and observed frequency.
If we inspect each collexeme pair by means of various types of semantic relations, differences among sections would be apparent. Figure 6.1 provides the breakdown of semantic relations identified for each N1-N2 collexeme pair in all sections except for abstract. From the graph above we can see that the introduction section is predominated by action of -constructions such as sequence analysis of the PPT promoter and transcription of protein-coding genes. Both the methods and results sections, in contrast, have the highest proportion of quality of -constructions. The quality of -constructions include both attributive ones like a complete loss of activity, the mobility of each polypeptide of the expressed proteins and quantitative ones like 22 bases of exon P4 and the low steady-state levels of RNA. The results section has far more attributive of -constructions than the methods section. The discussion section is where we can find the most evenly distributed types of semantic relations with the part-whole of -constructions as the highest. Part-whole of -constructions like the largest subunit of mammalian RNA polymerase II or members of the C/EBP family are commonly used in the discussion section by the academic writers to validate their
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claims by means of establishing membership. The others section, which covers the captions of figures in each research article, appears to resemble the results section except for the higher proportion for derivative of -constructions. Generally speaking, the derivative of -constructions are much rarer as compared to the other three types of semantic relations. However, derivative of -constructions like the effect of phosphatase treatment and typical results of several experiments can be found in the captions for figures for making a comparison among the data. In general, the the action of -constructions predominate the introduction section by highlighting certain research actions to be carried out in the study, while quality of -constructions are more frequently found in the methods, results, and others sections to describe and quantify research entities. All four types of semantic relations can be found quite evenly in the discussion section with a slightly higher proportion for the part-whole of -constructions involved in describing relationships possibly to establish a link to the research community.
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Figure 6.1 Distribution of the semantic relations of of -constructions in various sections of a research article
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In this section, we used a mini corpus of ten research articles in the natural science to demonstrate the various types of of -constructions used in each section of an empirical research article. With a large number of unique combinations of N1 and N2 found, the teaching the of -constructions would be more feasible if we make use of the four categories of semantic relations to raise learner’s awareness.
6.2.2 Instruction to Agent Demotion
The preliminary observation from our corpus data shows that agent demotion with the use of the of -construction at the subject position is likely to take place along with modal verbs such as need to and have to and modal auxiliaries such as must and should. Generally speaking, the academic writers not only have to compete with their readers for publishing ideas but also need to seek for their support of ideas (e.g., Hyland, 2005) which resembles an ongoing tug-of-war in academic writing. Making use of words carefully is therefore important, particularly when it is necessary to give advice or comments to demonstrate one’s stance. When words with a stronger evaluative meaning are used, it is important that we do not offend anyone. One of the ways to avoid this potential problem is by leaving the addressee unspecified or agent demotion. The purpose of this exercise is to address how agent demotion can be attained by using the of -construction. Where can we normally find evaluative comments in a research article? The very first example is from a discussion section where a writer may suggest some directions to be followed in the future work as shown in (6.1).
(6.1) Radiological referrals from all sources in the district decreased in 1990:
general practice by 9.4%, hospital inpatients by 15.4%, hospital outpatients by 14.6%, and accident and emergency units by 11.1%. Generation of referral data should be a routine requirement for all NHS radiology departments.
Without this information the appropriateness of the referral practice of individual users or the whole organisation cannot be monitored. This requirement should be specified in the tender document for the purchase of radiology services.
If we contrast Example (6.1) with Example (6.2), we can find that the presence of a
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pronoun your in the latter gives us a clue as to whom the action in the of -construction ought to be carried out. On the other hand, in the former case of agent demotion where such a specification is absent leaves more room for speculation as to whom the direction is addressed.
(6.2) HOW TO CHOOSE CRITICAL ANALYSES TO WORK WITH Think about what you are looking for when you consult a textbook. Are you seeking: (a) background factual information? (b) other people‘s interpretations of what you are reading? (c) accepted areas for debate (to narrow down what you think you should say, because of what other people have chosen to talk about)?
Your use of information sources needs to be guided by a sense of purpose in your search, as well as by the interest and pleasure of browsing. (HXH-394)
Instances of agent demotion appear to resemble those constructions with a passive voice in (6.1) and (6.4) also found in a discussion section.
(6.3) If anaemia cannot be controlled with oral iron more, detailed detailed investigation should be considered including colonoscopy, small bowel radiology, small bowel enteroscopy, and gut arteriography. If these are negative and frequent blood transfusions are required, laparotomy with synchronous whole gut endoscopy and external inspection of the transilluminated gut should be considered. (HWT-896)
Finally, here is an extreme case with the use of the verb ignore.
(6.4) However, many community education projects have a social and political philosophy which sees community problems as the result of inadequate education effort on the part of institutions and the state, to be remedied by locally controlled community education networks. Acceptance of such a community philosophy ignores the fact: (a) that many local community problems are in fact national, structural problems; (b) that too much concentration on meeting articulated needs in an unimaginative and uncritical manner can result in a community education programme which, whilst reaching a section of the population never catered for before, in fact assists individual advancement but does little to assist collective advancement towards solutions to the problems of poverty and inequality found in working-class communities. (GVX-149)
This section presents several examples of agent demotion with the use of the of -construction. As illustrated above, the use of agent demotion is usually for evaluative purposes commonly found in the discussion or conclusions sections. It is hoped that this introduction to agent demotion can be used by instructors to raise academic novice writer’s awarenss.
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