ABSTRACT
The present study examines structural variation of directives1 1 Directives are “attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to do something” (Searle, 1976:11), e.g., Teacher: “you should submit the essay by Friday midnight”. across different situational contexts in university lectures. The data comes from the lecture component of a large corpus of university discourse2 2 TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language corpus (T2K-SWAL, see Biber et al., 2002). . 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.
Keywords:
directives; academic discourse; university lectures; register variation
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