journal of linguistic studies

politicians. (specific statement 2) Cross-national variations in the political and
economic context systematically increase or undermine the voter's ability to
ascertain the competency of incumbents. (EPb6)
Step 1d is exploited in situations when the authors’ aim is to indicate a gap in the
previous research, which is accomplished by the use of the negative quantifier little with
the nouns attention, effort, negative verb phrases such as have not yet settled and
prepositional phrases as without any explanation.
(4) In the debate on ‘flexicurity’, relatively little attention has been paid to how
responsive traditional areas of social security have been to increasing flexibility in
the labour market. (SPa7)
Move Background includes Step 1e - using contradictory statements, which, as its
name suggests, points to the exploitation of the sentences contradictory to the previous
ones. It is signalled by the use of discourse markers however, but and the adjective
contradictory.
(5) Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidates in
elections and when winning candidates choose among policy alternatives in
government. But the inextricably linked institutions, incentives, and behaviour
that determine these multistage choices are substantively complex and
analytically unwieldy, particularly if modelled explicitly and considered in total,
from citizen preferences through government outcomes. (EPb4)
The second step within Background move is Stating Key Characteristics, referring
to the key characteristics of a topic. It appears in only the social policy corpus, meaning
that it is optional. Step 2 is characterised by the use of the verb highlight and the noun
phrase a number of issues, such as in the following example:
(6) The study of EU social policy highlights a number of issues especially well,
among them the unfolding institutionalisation of a social field in EU politics and
policy, and the changing nature of economic and social governance in Europe.
(SPa1)
Introducing purpose is an obligatory move in the structure of the corpus from all
three fields (see Table 1). It consists of four steps relating to the authors’ intentions,
problems or subjects of the research, theses, hypotheses, purpose, objective or goal which
the authors present in different ways. They provide a description of their present
research, indicate aim or purpose, raise certain questions and fill a gap in the previous
research. The analysis has demonstrated that Step 1 is dominant in social, election and
foreign policy. Step 4: Filling a Gap in the Previous Research has not been found only
in the field of election policy with the reason that the same corpus does not include Step
1d – indicating a gap in the previous research within Move 1 - Background, which is
supposed to be filled in Move 2 - Introducing Purpose.
Step 1 – Describing the Present Research is most frequently signalled by the use of
the determiners the / this with the inanimate nouns article, study and paper (see ex. 7).
Apart from the inanimate subject, the authors tend to use the animate subject as well,
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