Linguistic dimension of moves in research presentations in science and engineering

Chapter 6 presents the framework used for analyzing the linguistic features of the corpora that are described in Chapters 4 and 5 . The procedure followed was the ESP method of genre analysis, which considers a genre to be a repeatedly used communicative event that is highly structured and conventionalized in order to effectively and efficiently present the information that it carries. The rationale is given for ‘hint expressions’ that are used in genre texts to guide the reader or listener and differ from formulaic expressions or lexical bundles. A hint expression is defined as a move-embedded, text-level entity that informs the receiver of the intention of the sender of the text. Comparison of the use of hint expressions by expert and novice native speakers of English revealed differences in how they were used.