discourse function

Antonymy is a unique semantic relation between two lexical forms that are opposite while at the same time they share some basic similarities. Antonyms have attracted attention of linguists interested in lexical semantics. A number of linguists such as Lyons (1977), Cruse (1986) and Murphey (2003) have examined lexical and semantic characteristics of antonyms. Some other scholars have paid attention to discourse functions of antonymy among whom Jones (2002) have provided the most clear-cut theoretical framework. Jones used a test set of 56 word pairs that were well-known, conventional antonyms. They were not balanced across word class, morphological complexity, word length or frequency ranking, but were selected to be representative of the antonym relation. He extracted all instances of these antonyms co-occurring in sentences from a British newspaper corpus of 280 million words. Jones limited the analysis to a sample of 3000 sentences. Approximately every 30th sentence was extracted from the corpus. He then adjusted it so that no more than 60% of the sentences involved adjectival antonymous pairs, in order to ensure that there were sufficient noun, verb, and adverb pairs within the sample. Next, the discourse function of each antonymous pair was identified. One of the categories introduced in Jones (2002) was ancillary function in which an antonym pair is used to create or highlight a secondary contrast within sentence/discourse. The second major antonym function is coordinated antonymy, in which the distinction between the two opposite is neutralized. Comparative antonymy involves measuring one antonym against the other. The distinguished function calls attention to the inherent distinction between the members of the antonym pair. Transitional antonymy expresses a movement or change from one location, activity or state to another. The negated antonymy function emphasizes one member of the antonym pair by using it with the negation of the other member. Jones's last category is idiomatic category, in which any instance of antonym co-occurrence would be recognized as a familiar idiom.     The previous studies conducted on some languages including Persian revealed that in spite of some differences across languages, almost all of them follow quite the same patterns in implementing different discourse functions. The present study enjoys theoretical as well as methodological concepts from syntax, semantics and discourse analysis to recognize Persian antonyms and identify their discourse function and then the relevant syntactic framework. Here, we attempt to answer the following four questions;
1. What is the share of each discourse function in Persian antonyms?
2. What is the relationship between grammatical framework and discourse function of antonyms?
3. What are the most frequent antonyms in Persian (non)virtual texts?
4. What is the semantic nature of antonyms as far as the kind of genre is concerned?
To shed light on the questions, a corpus of 4000 Persian sentences which contained antonyms was selected. They were extracted from written, verbal and virtual genres. The criterion was that each antonym whether noun, verb, adjective, adverb or pronoun had to occur in a single sentence. Next, the part of speech, discourse function and grammatical framework of each antonym were identified.     The findings indicate that in Persian the coordinated discourse function is the most frequent function and other functions, i.e. negated, transitional, idioms, ancillary, and comparative follow that. It is also revealed that there is a significant relationship between some syntactic frameworks and discourse functions. For example, the syntactic framework of "X and Y" is significantly frequent in coordinated discourse function. Likewise, it is shown that there exists a relationship between the semantic nature of some antonymous pairs and their frequency in some genres. For instance, the antonymous pair 'real-virtual' is used just in virtual corpus. These kinds of findings help corpus linguistics researchers predict the type of corpus with an eye to some antonymous pairs.     To be specific, it should be mentioned that out of 4000 antonyms, 1432 antonyms are nouns, 926 items are verbs, 800 ones are adjectives, 501 cases are adverbs, 89 antonyms are pronouns and finally, 252 antonyms form idiomatic expressions. As far as the discourse function is concerned, 1843 antonyms are coordinated, 533 items are labelled 'extra', 313 cases transitional, 253 antonyms are idiomatic, 226 items are ancillary and 87 ones are comparatives. Hence, the coordinated discourse function ranks the highest one and the negated, transitional, idiomatic, ancillary and comparatives are followed respectively.  It is also shown that there is some relationship between specific discourse functions and grammatical frameworks. For example, the syntactic framework X and Y is frequent in coordinated discourse function. Likewise, it is revealed that there is a connection between some antonyms and the genre they appear. As one example, we may refer to the antonyms 'vaaqe'i (real) against 'majaazi' (virtual) which appear just in Persian virtual genre. Studies like this would help corpus linguists predict the genre of texts based on the existing antonyms.

Background University students have to deal with a number of academic skills and literacies such as listening to academic lectures, taking notes, and writing academic essays. The students’ success in their academic work depends on their successful undertaking of these skills. Yet, many students find it difficult to cope with these literacies. English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) students may run further into problem, as they lack the necessary skills to comprehend and produce a diverse range of complex academic discourses.
One of these skills, academic lecturing plays a significant role in academic education. The importance of lectures in academic education has made some scholars believe that comprehending lectures is of critical importance to the students’ academic success. Yet, understanding academic lectures is a considerable challenge for students in English-medium classes. Part of this difficulty has been attributed to “an overwhelming impression of speed and a lack of control over the speaker” (Lynch, 2011, p. 81). Additionally, academic lectures have “very dense informational packaging” (Lin, 2010, p. 1174). Lectures abound with important information. The dense distribution of information in lectures makes it difficult for the students to comprehend all the information presented throughout the lecture. Therefore, it is important for the students to be able to differentiate between important and unimportant information.
Expressions that help students differentiate between important and unimportant information are referred to as relevance/importance markers (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2007; Deroey& Taverniers, 2012; Hunston, 1994), ‘importance cues’ (Kiewra, 2002), ‘emphasizers’ (Siepmann, 2005), ‘selection cues’ (Titsworth & Kiewra, 2004), and ‘focusers’ (Simpson, 2004).
With these points in mind, an understanding of how important information is distinguished from unimportant information in academic lectures is of crucial importance. Nevertheless, very little is known about them. Except for a few studies that have specifically dealt with importance marking in English lectures (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2004, 2007; Deroey, 2015; Deroey & Taverniers, 2012), what we know about this function is limited to studies that have found examples of importance markers (Biber, 2006; DeCarrico & Nattinger, 1988; Young, 1994; among others). Furthermore, it is now widely recognized that discourse structuring or organization devices facilitate the students’ comprehension, note-taking and recall of lectures (e.g., Olsen & Huckin, 1990).This study attempts to explore importance marking in English and Persian academic lectures.
Methodology The study adopts an approach which is descriptive, contrastive, and corpus-driven. It aims at eliciting the importance markers from the English and Persian academic lectures. All the importance markers in the academic lectures were elicited from two corpora. Afterwards, the elicited importance markers from the Persian and English academic lectures were investigated functionally.
To be more exact, two corpora were used in this research to explore the un/importance markers: the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus and the Persian corpus of SOKHAN. The BASE corpus was developed at the Universities of Warwick and Reading, England under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Paul Thompson. BASE comprises the audio and video recordings, and the transcripts of 160 English lectures and 39 seminars, totaling 1,644,942 words (Nesi, 2012). The lecture section which is the basis for the analysis of this dissertation contains 1,186,290 words. The lectures were recorded between 1998 and 2005. Lectures are equally distributed across four broad disciplinary groups, i.e. arts and humanities (ah), life and medical sciences (ls), physical sciences (ps), and social studies (ss).
The Persian corpus of SOKHAN was developed at the Science and Technology Park of North Khorasan, Iran under the directorship of Javad Zare and Zahra Keivanlou-Shahrestanaki. Corpus development was assisted by funding from the Technology University of Esfarayen and the Science and Technology Park of North Khorasan. SOKHAN consists of audio and video recordings, and the transcripts of 60 Persian academic lectures, totaling 480,526 words. The lectures of SOKHAN were recorded between 2010 and 2015. They are delivered mainly by the male native speakers of Persian lecturers. The lectures of SOKHAN evenly spread in the four disciplinary groups of engineering (es), humanities (hs), medicine (ms), and base sciences (bs).
Results and conclusion The findings suggest that regardless of language, importance marking in the academic lectures is done via five discourse functions including audience engagement, discourse organization, subject status, topic treatment, and being related to exam. Besides, differentiating between the important points and the trivial ones is not necessarily done via only a single discourse function. Another finding of this research is that topic treatment markers of importance indicate importance only implicitly. It should be noted that audience engagement markers of importance were found to be the most frequently used markers in the academic lectures. Generally, marking importance in the English and Persian academic lectures mostly involves orienting the discourse to the audience. To put it differently, the presenters mostly tend to get engaged with the audience in order to indicate the important information.

Persian has a canonical word order. However, there are some sentences with non-canonical word order which are considered marked. Studies on such sentences have shown that a number of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors affect the word order in sentences. Marked word order is used to fulfill discourse and pragmatic functions, including giving prominence, creating contrastive emphasis or emphatic prominence. Such functions are sometimes fulfilled by moving the arguments out of their unmarked position. By analyzing data from literary and scientific Persian texts, as well as stories and newspapers, the discourse functions of the marked orders were identified as follows: non-contrastive emphasis by postposing subjects, prominence or contrast by preposing direct objects and putting them in the position of focus by postposing them, and also contrastive functions by postposing indirect objects.

Academic lecturing has tuned into the major teaching method in higher education. Due to the excess of verbal and visual information presented in a lecture and the importance of some of these information in the final assessment of a course, an understanding of how unimportant information is marked in lectures is useful. The present investigation was an attempt to investigate how lecturers mark unimportant information in Persian academic lectures. More specifically, this study was aimed to investigate the discourse functions of markers of lesser importance. Based on a mixed-methods approach, markers of lesser importance were extracted from the transcripts of the 60 academic lectures of the Persian corpus of SOKHAN. The derived markers of lesser importance were then analyzed in terms of their discourse functions. Five discourse functions, including discourse organization, audience engagement, subject status, topic treatment, and relating to exam were found. In addition, topic treatment, followed by subject status, accounted for most of the discourse functions of the markers of lesser importance. Moreover, audience engagement, discourse organization, and relating to exam were found to be the least frequent discourse functions. On the whole, the findings suggested that marking lesser importance does not necessarily involves orientation to the audience or organizing the discourse into points and asides. Instead, marking lesser importance most often necessitates using expressions that explicitly or implicitly demarcate boundaries between what the lecturer wishes to talk about, does not intend to go through, or tends to cover briefly.

Discourse function of lexical antonymy was initially introduced in Jones (2002). In that theoretical model، main classes of discourse functions were labeled as ancillary، coordinated، distinguished، transitive، negated، comparative and idiom. The present study attempted to examine the discourse function of antonymy across a natural corpus of Persian language. The corpus included 16 Persian texts from which 1000 sentences are extracted. Each sentence represents one antonymous pair. The findings show that from among four lexical categories، i. e. adjective، noun، verb and adverb، the adjective category outnumbers other categories in making antonymous pairs. Two Persian word-pairs ‘chap-rAst’ (left-right) and ‘bAlA-pA’in’ (up-down) proved to be the most frequent antonymous word pairs. The results showed that unlike English، Swedish and Japanese where the ancillary discourse function tops the function classes، in Persian the most frequent function is coordination. The high frequency of idiomatic function confirms the claim that a function of antnymy in Persian makes idioms and proverbs.