Just remember this: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures

Abstract

Just remember this: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lecturesThis paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight important or relevant points in lectures. Despite the established usefulness of discourse organizational cues for lecture comprehension and note-taking, very little is known about the marking of relevance in this genre. The current overview of lexicogrammatical relevance markers combines a qualitative and quantitative investigation of 160 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. These markers could mostly be classified according to their main element into adjective, noun, verb and adverb patterns. Verb patterns were the most common, followed by noun patterns. The verb pattern V clause (e.g. remember slavery had already been legally abolished) and the noun pattern MN v-link (e.g. the point is) are the predominant types of relevance markers. The discrepancy between the prevalent markers and what may be thought of as prototypical or included in EAP textbooks as relevance markers also demonstrates the need for corpus linguistic research. Implications for EAP course design, teaching English for lecturing purposes, and educational research are discussed.

‘Ignore that 'cause it's totally irrelevant’: Marking lesser relevance in lectures

“…4 This may appear counterintuitive and in fact our strong impression in examining the pilot corpus was that relevance markers were far more common. However, a closer look at the data reveals that the predominance of markers of lesser relevance is chiefly due to items which may -but do not necessarily-serve this function, while relevance markers depend far less on the context for their pragmatic effect and are hence more easily recognisable (see Deroey and Taverniers, 2012). …”

“…(4), but never mind). Interestingly, the same holds for markers of important points (Deroey and Taverniers, 2012). While these discourse markers are multifunctional and a detailed discussion of their use with markers of (lesser) relevance is beyond the scope of this article, they basically seem to help demarcate the boundaries between less and more relevant discourse.…”

“…We created a subcorpus of 40 lectures (331,474 tokens), ten per disciplinary group, and systematically varied study level, interactivity, and audience size. We believe this subcorpus is sufficiently large to create a fairly representative picture of how lesser relevance is marked in the larger corpus as these 40 lectures yielded most relevance markers in a previous, more comprehensive study on relevance marking (see Deroey and Taverniers, 2012). The entire BASE lecture corpus was used to retrieve further instances of the markers of lesser relevance attested in the subcorpus so that we could gain a better understanding of how they function to signal lesser relevance.…”

“…The identification was based on co-textual features and a knowledge of the genre. As in our previous study on relevance markers (Deroey and Taverniers, 2012), we excluded quoted material and markers of lesser relevance evaluating student or third party discourse. Full agreement was reached about the identification of these devices, with one exception.…”

“…When indicating comparative relevance, lecturers simultaneously organise discourse by establishing a hierarchy of importance of lecture points (Deroey and Taverniers, 2012) and convey their attitudinal evaluation of these along a 'parameter of importance or relevance' (Thompson and Hunston, 2000: 24). The focus is thus on the evaluation of 'discourse entities' (Thetela, 1997, cited in Hunston, 2000, i.e.…”