Importance marking: Giving reference to the highlighted discourse in academic lectures

Abstract

This study was an attempt to explore how important points are highlighted in Persian academic lectures. More specifically, this paper was aimed to reach a taxonomy of importance markers based on (a) the discourse functions of importance markers, and (b) the relative position of the importance marker to the highlighted discourse. A mixed-methods (exploratory) approach and a corpus-driven method were used to extract importance markers from 60 lectures of the Persian SOKHAN corpus. In terms of discourse functions, importance marking was found to be done by a set of five discourse functions, i.e. discourse organization, audience engagement, subject status, topic treatment, and relating to exam. Among these, audience engagement was the first most frequently used discourse function. Additionally, in terms of the position of the highlighted discourse, eight patterns were found for anaphoric importance marking. Ten patterns were also found for cataphoric importance marking. Moreover, cataphoric importance markers were considerably more prevalent than anaphoric importance markers. Generally, the findings suggested that lecturers are more inclined to function interpersonally in Persian academic contexts. The paper ends with pedagogical implications