Structural Variation of Directives in University Classroom Discourse: A Corpus-Based Investigation

ABSTRACT The present study examines structural variation of directives1 across different situational contexts in university lectures. The data comes from the lecture component of a large corpus of university discourse2. The following analytical steps were taken: 1) possible linguistic patterns of directives were manually identified in sample lectures; 2) five most-frequent lexico-grammatically explicit structural types of directives were selected for automatic analysis; 3)Python scripts were written to automatically identify directives with the five structural types; 4) structural variation of directives was analyzed in relation to three situational variables: level of interaction, level of instruction, and discipline. Results show that situational variables affect the use of directives in important ways.

摘要 本研究考察了大学讲座中不同情境语境下指令行为1（directives）的结构变异。研究数据取自大型大学语篇2（discourse）语料库中的讲座子库。本研究采用如下分析步骤：1）在抽样讲座中手动识别指令行为的潜在语言模式；2）选取出现频率最高的5种词汇语法显性指令结构类型开展自动化分析；3）编写Python脚本自动识别符合上述5种结构类型的指令行为；4）结合互动层级、教学层级与学科门类三类情境变量，分析指令行为的结构变异。研究结果表明，情境变量对指令行为的使用具有显著影响。