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ERIC Number: EJ1381127
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 27
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-2630-0672
EISSN: EISSN-2672-9431
Should a Book Be Judged by Its Back Cover? Some Written/Formal Features as Observed in Happily-Ever-After Women's Novel Blurbs
Pupipat, Apisak
LEARN Journal: Language Education and Acquisition Research Network, v16 n1 p604-630 Jan-Jun 2023
This study examined written/formal register based on happilyever-after women's fiction conventional blurbs. In particular, the 80 blurbs were equally divided into two types: the classic and mass-marketed. Biber et al. (2021) was used as the framework to extract features to respond to the two research questions: What were the top written/formal features among the classic and mass-marketed happily-ever-after women's novel blurbs? And, which blurb type displayed more resemblance to written/formal register? The functional framework comprised three main groups of features: The passives, adjectivals and adverbials. Results revealed that the first two showed a strong tendency towards written/formal register while the last seemed to show the opposite but was taken here to be in-between features, corresponding to fiction language. The top written/formal features based on the two types of blurbs were the passives (both the full and reduced forms) (26%), full relative clauses (23%), full adverbial clauses (20%) and attributives (13%). The blurb type that seemed inclined towards written/formal nature more was the classic, as substantiated by five salient features: the passives, attributives, -en adjectivals, -ing adverbials and -en adverbials. It is believed that discourse analysts and ESL/EFL teachers can pay more attention to these useful syntactic features, particularly the full and reduced forms, as ways to compress information in formal writing.
Language Institute of Thammasat University. The Prachan Campus, 2 Prachan Road, Bangkok 10200 Thailand. e-mail: learnjournal@gmail.com; Web site: https://www.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/learn
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A