Nominal encapsulation in oral and written academic discourse: grammatical and discourse patterns

Abstract

The following article discusses nominal unfaithful encapsulation on a corpus of Spanish conference presentations and the corresponding Proceedings articles in Linguistics (102 903 words). A nominal unfaithful encapsulator is a noun which sums up the content of a predicative portion of text and categorizes it as a discourse entity. This cohesive strategy is commonly used in lexico-grammatical patterns such as postnominal clause patterns (the fact that/to…), attributive complementing clause patterns (the fact is that/to…) or in discourse patterns such as anaphoric attributive pattern, rhematic pattern, thematic pattern and interpretative framework pattern. This study analyses the functions and frequency of these patterns in oral and written research genres. Results show that some of these patterns are more widely used in one of these two modes of communication. It is also argued that some of these encapsulators are attracted to some of these patterns, thus demonstrating the existence of close relationships between lexis and discourse grammar.