Applied Linguistics28/2:266–285ßOxford University Press2007 doi:10.1093/applin/amm011
Applying a Gloss:Exemplifying and Reformulating in Academic Discour
KEN HYLAND
University of London
A great deal of rearch has now established that written texts embody
interactions between writers and readers,but few studies have examined the ways that small acts of reformulation and exemplification help contribute to this.Abstraction,theorisation and interpretation need to be woven into a text which makes n to a particular community of readers,and this invariably involves frequent reworkings and exemplifications as writers asss the processing needs,knowledge and rhetorical expectations of their readers to prent and then interpret ideas as they write.Known as code gloss in the metadiscour literature,the elaborations help to contribute to the creation of coherent,reader-friendly pro while conveying the writer’s audience-nsitivity and relationship to the message.Drawing on a large corpus of rearch articles,I explore how professional academic writers monitor their texts for readers in this way to restate information or provide examples as they construct their arguments.Analysis of the corpus reveals that elaboration is
a complex and important rhetorical function in academic writing,and that
both its u and meanings vary according to discipline.
Constructing explanations for events in the natural and social worlds is often en as fundamental to scientific discour.We look to the sciences for plausible reasons why things are as they are and writers take care to reprent their arguments by identifying,classifying and interpreting features of the real world in ways which are likely to make most n,and be most persuasive,to their particular communities of readers.This interest in scientific persuasion has produced a substantial literature devoted to describing the many linguistic and rhetorical resources which contribute to such argumentative process.Surprisingly little,however,has been written about the many small acts of elaboration,embellishment,and clarification which occur in the process of creating a plausible argument. Abstraction,theorisation and interpretation need to be woven into an overt framework of argument so that an explanation makes n to its intended readers,and this often involves frequent expansions,reworkings, and exemplifications as writers constantly prent and then interpret ideas on thefly.Collectively known as code gloss in the metadiscour literature (Hyland2005),the brief reformulations and exemplifications help to contribute to the creation of coherent,reader-friendly pro while conveying the writer’s audience-nsitivity and relationship to th
e message.This article
KEN HYLAND267 is concerned with such acts of interaction,local elaboration,and on-line clarification.Drawing on a large corpus of rearch articles,I explore how professional academic writers constantly monitor their texts to restate information or provide examples as they construct their arguments.I will first look briefly at the nature of the acts and then go on to discuss the study.
ELABORATION AND CODE GLOSSING
Every academic text is written to be both understood and accepted,and while neither goal is ever completely assured,writers who can successfully predict something of what their readers will know of their subject and expect of its prentation are more likely to be convincing.Bad on their assumptions of their readers and their previous experiences with similar texts,writers constantly monitor their unfolding discour to address the expectations,making rhetorical choices which negotiate appropriate engagement and explicitness.They identify where readers will need help in interpreting points,where greater elaboration or specificity is required,where clarification or examples are needed,and so on.In other words,arguments are underpinned and supported by small acts of propositional embellishment which rve to enhance understanding,shape meanings more precily
to the writer’s goals, and relate statements to the reader’s experience,knowledge-ba,and processing needs.
Halliday(1994:225)discuss this kind of propositional expansion as a mantic relationship of elaboration,where‘one clau elaborates on the meaning of another by further specifying or describing it’.In contrast to cas where a cond unit extends the meaning of a previous unit by adding something new,or qualifies it by reference to time,place,manner,condition, etc.,the condary clau does not introduce a new element but‘provides a further characterisation of one that is already there,restating it,clarifying it, refining it,or adding a descriptive attribute or comment’(1994:225). The examples from my rearch article corpus illustrate this kind of rhetorical work:
(1)conditional statements merely construct the dependence
of one proposition on the truth of another.Or,in slightly
different terms,the if clau ts up an imaginary world in which
the proposition in the then clau is
(applied linguistics article) The have rested on assumptions that power is‘zero-sum’,that
is,afinite resource which people cannot share.(sociology article)
An annual production capacity of4000hours(50weeksÃ80
hours/week)was assumed for the system.
(electrical engineering article)
268EXEMPLIFYING AND REFORMULATING IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
A farm that is a cash grain enterpri is about24%more likely
to adopt no-tillage than,say,a dairy farm,while the
type of single owner versus partnership)of
the farm has no effect on the conrvation tillage adoption
decision.
(mechanical engineering article)
As can be en,the meanings can be expresd by the juxtaposition of noun phras,in academic discour often marked off by punctuation, with the cond part enclod between brackets and—occasionally—dashes or commas.More often,they are signalled explicitly by what Downing and Locke(1992:283)call an elaborating conjunction and Blakemore (1993)an apposition marker,devices such as that is,for example,namely and in slightly different terms which link such claus overtly.The conjuncts provide cohesive,rather than structural,linking and offer metadiscursive cues which ek to reduce the possibility of pragmatic ambiguity.
Such connections have traditionally been classified as appositive(Quirk et al.1972:620),where the cond unit of text is to be treated as equivalent to or included in the previous unit(Biber et al.1999:876).This classification, however is both too restrictive,as the connection can also occur across ntence boundaries(e Burton-Roberts1993),and too vague,and it is more productive to e the lexical and parenthetical signals as contributing to the class of communicative resources known as metadiscour markers (Hyland2004,2005;Hyland and T2004).
Esntially,metadiscour is lf-reflective matter which makes reference to the evolving text or to th
e writer and imagined reader of that text.It therefore acts to connect,organi and interpret material with regard to the understandings and values of a particular discour community (Hyland2000).More specifically,the features are examples of code gloss, or items which supply additional information by rephrasing,explaining or elaborating what has been said to ensure the reader is able to recover the writer’s intended meaning.Such items facilitate argument in academic discour by contributing to the logic of the unfolding discour rather than to the logic of events as they occur in the real world(Martin and Ro2003).
REFORMULATION AND EXEMPLIFICATION
Code gloss are,ostensibly at least,almost always concerned with clarification of the writer’s communicative purpo.The term reprents a number of basic communication strategies ud in the negotiation of meaning in many different contexts,occurring in both spoken and written language,to facilitate the reader’s understanding.In this paper I will be concerned with two broad sub-functions of this purpo:reformulation and exemplification.
KEN HYLAND269
Reformulation
Reformulation is a discour function whereby the cond unit is a restatement or elaboration of thefirst in different words,to prent it from a different point of view and to reinforce the message.In academic writing such connections are often signalled parenthetically or lexically by what
I shall call‘reformulation markers’as in(2):
(2)Between what Braj Kachru(1988)appropriately calls the
Outer Circle,or the countries where English was brought by
colonization,and the
(applied linguistics article) They argued,on the basis of the emerging survey data,that
drug u by young people is becoming so common that it is no
longer regarded as a‘deviant’activity by them.Put another way,
they claim that drug u among young people is becoming
normalid.
(sociology article) The term‘natural’then functions as a mythic construct in the
context of fashion discour(Barthes1983),that is,an amorphous
ideal who form is continuously reformulated in ways that
sanction prent-day standards.
(marketing article) Reformulations have largely been treated as‘repairs’in unplanned discour (e.g.Schegloff et al.1977),displaying the speaker’s recognition that the original formulation was not an appropriate means of achieving commu-nicative success or,in Blakemore’s(1993:101)terms,that it did not achieve optimal relevance.Reformulations in writing,however,must be en as part of a plan and therefore purpoful,indicating that the writer is eking to convey particular meanings or achieve particular rhetorical effects.Esntially, reformulation is a discour function whereby a writer re-elaborates an idea to facilitate comprehension.This is common in rearch minars where members reformulate other speakers’previous utterances in working towards comprehension(so you are ,what you are )(Gonzales1996 reported in Swales2004).It tends,therefore,to be regarded as an equivalence operation so that the two units are different ways of expressing a single idea, as in this example:
(3)Of a sample of927consumers,844respondents,or91%,had
heard of organic foods.
(marketing) Formulation A(844people out of927in a sample)¼formulation
B(91%of the sample).
But while adjacent text elements may be‘about’the same thing in that the subject matter remains the same,meaning is not created solely through
270EXEMPLIFYING AND REFORMULATING IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE propositional material.Rather,meaning is the result of an interactive process between the producer and receiver of a text in which the writer choos formulations which are most likely to cure understanding and agreement. Reformulations can thus rve a variety of functions beyond summarising or ‘gisting’.While writers may prent two‘versions’of the same material, alternative formulations of a single idea rarely constitute identical meanings and tend to go beyond strict paraphra to prent what the writer considers to be the key elements of a prior utterance.I shall return to the meanings in a later ction.
Exemplification
Exemplification is a communication process through which meaning is clarified or supported by a cond unit which illustrates thefirst by citing an example.While example can refer to larger discour units including ca studies,I am restricting its u here to refer to a group,clau, word,or numericalfigure.Once again,the can be signalled by punctuation,normally parenthes,by linking adverbials and by abbrevia-tions such as, e.g.,I collectively refer to the as‘exemplificatory markers’(Lee2004:298):
(4)In recent decades,this pattern has been complicated in most
states by developments such as the lowering of the legal drinking
age and the extension of trading hours for many venues to early
morning or all night.
(sociology) ...studentsfind reading in English to be difficult and that
lf lected reading did not em as valuable as other activities
(e.g.,required school work,TOEFL study).
(applied linguistics) Here again,operators like A&P,Dominick’s,Jewel,Safeway,Tom
Thumb and Vons have continued with their Hi-Lo strategy and are
successful.
(marketing) Other units get changed to a more dramatic extent:SI units for
moment of inertia,for example,becoming kg.m rad.
(physics) Exemplification is a recurrent feature of academic writing and a central aspect of exposition,a part of the routine ways in which writers in all fields ek to make their ideas accessible and persuasive.Esntially it is an appeal to understandings the writer believes are recoverable from the example:prenting an element of the writer’s data or experience to make the abstract more concrete.As a result,it reveals something of the writer’s predictions about the reader’s familiarity with the topic and world knowledge.
