MAG 2019: Silvia Murillo shows a study on code glosess based on the EUROPROwebs corpus

Together with other members of the InterGedi research group, Silvia Murillo participated at the Metadiscourse Across Genres (MAG) International Conference of this year, under the motto Metadiscourse in Digital Communication: What has changed?. This international event was yet another opportunity to keep developing and revisiting the frameworks of metadiscourse. Murillo made in this case a presentation on the specific uses of code glosses in websites belonging to European research projects, in order to identify new metadiscursive patterns in specific digital environments.

Abstract:

Code glosses in European project websites

European project websites are visibility-enhancing platforms for the project participants (institutions and academics) and their research. In order to compile the contents of the different pages of such project websites, some general judgements about the intended readers must be made, together with some specific assumptions about their knowledge and cognitive abilities. Some evidence of these assumptions may be found in the use of code glosses (interactive metadiscourse), for instance, in definitions of technical terms and exemplifications of concepts and ideas (cf. Hyland 2007, Murillo 2012). Thus, this paper aims to analyse the role of code glosses in the text included in European project websites. I will carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of 15 websites of the Horizon 2020 research programme, which form part of a pilot corpus on digital genres carried out by the InterGEDI research group at the University of Zaragoza. I will focus on the more fixed pages of the websites, i.e. those which are used to state the aim and objectives of the project and to describe the main outcomes. Grammaticalized discourse markers of reformulation (i.e., that is, that is to say, in other words, namely) and exemplification (for example, for instance) will be analysed, and also other metalinguistic expressions and punctuation signs used to introduce these discourse processes, such as parentheses. Attention will be paid to the use of links as reformulating devices. From this research, we can obtain some insights into the intended purposes and readership of the websites. Although different audiences (stakeholders, scholars in the field, other scholars) may be contemplated, it seems that the webs also consider the general public as their target audience, primarily to present their project research as valuable for society.