Peter Muntigl & Helmut Gruber

Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, Austria
Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Wien, Austria

Generic and Rhetorical Structures of Student Term Papers: Which succeed and which don’t?

In our paper we will discuss in what ways generic structures (analysed in terms of Register & Genre Theory) and rhetorical structures (in terms of Rhetorical Structure Theory) of student term papers relate to each other, and what insights we may gain in analyzing texts from both these perspectives. Our data is taken from a project that is currently being conducted at Vienna University. Student papers from 3 different departments were examined using both an R> and RST approach.

Central to our discussion are issues involving the ways generic and rhetorical structures may be signalled in texts (e.g., metacommunicative sequences, activation of specific patterns of ideational and interpersonal meanings); the relation between hierarchical (i.e., orbital) vs. linear (i.e., serial) structures and the question if and how these structures may indicate which parts of a text are central (foregrounded) and which are peripheral (backgrounded). An account of the relationship between the two kinds of text structures should have practical consequences for the understanding of how university students construct their texts, how they might be helped to improve their writing and why different generic/ rhetorical structures may receive better grades than others.